'Less' vs 'fewer'

Here's an issue on which supermarkets tend to catch a lot of flak--and deservedly so, I might add. The offense? Most often, the signs that mark the express lanes read "Twelve items or less," rather than "Twelve items or fewer" as received usage dictates. At stake here is the distinction between count and mass nouns--or, as Strunk & White's The Elements of Style and many other usage guides put it, between number and quantity.

The traditional rule states that "fewer" be used in comparisons that involve number ("Jerry has seven fewer kumquats than Susan") and "less" for comparisons involving bulk or quantity ("Susan has less butter than Jerry does"). Strictly speaking, saying that Jerry has less kumquats than Susan makes as much grammatical sense as claiming that Jerry has eight (or twelve, or twenty, or five million) "butters": in each case, the basic distinction is breached, though it's a lot more obvious in the latter example.

By the way, a friend of mine--the same one who left Tech over 'alot,' incidentally (see earlier entry)--is especially vehement about this one. She uses the phrase "less sand, fewer grains of sand" as a mnemonic device to keep the difference in mind. For my part, I strongly agree with her that this distinction is important, not the least since such pairs of phrases as "His grievances were less than mine" and "His grievances were fewer than mine" have different meanings based on which word is chosen.