I'm fine with prescriptivism when it comes to things that are just errors, like writing "could of" instead of "could have", or using "irregardless". Fewer v less is just personal preference of people who have convinced themselves that not using "less" with countable nouns is a rule, contrary to both actual usage and the history of English. My preference is otherwise. For instance, I think "3 pills or fewer" sounds, if not wrong exactly, at least awkward as hell.

I prefer using fewer/less as emphasis, just as we sometimes use "is" and sometimes "are" for groups, depending on whether we want to emphasise the groups or the individual. For instance: "Fewer than 10 people have ever reached the summit of [some mountain]". I prefer fewer there to less, because it emphasises the small number and the individuality of the people. With the pills example, the pills are an undifferentiated morass; although technically countable, I don't want to emphasise their countability.

"Three pills or fewer" sounds totally normal and correct to my American/Minnesotan ears.

Spoken it sounds contrived to my English ears (as though intended to impress), but I accept pedantry in some formal documents.

Contrived is a good word.

Actually, re the pills example, Oxford Dictionaries says this:

Promise I hadn't read that already, but that's what I was saying; there's no cause to emphasise individuality there.

That's a pretty low bar.

That's a great rule but you can cite it because you're from Australia and have the UK sense of how to apply this distinction. Americans virtually never use "are" for group nouns: "The family is arguing" (US); "The family are arguing" (UK).

And Canadians these days largely follow the US practice.

I think supermarkets should stress individuality in the express lane. Forty yogurts isn't one ****ing item (despite my "isn't) when they all need to be rung separately.

Is this considered correct or just colloquial? The finite verb should be congruent in grammatical person and number with the subject.

Kinda depends on the store. I remember when I was a cashier a million years ago, at first you could just enter in a quantity and then scan one of the item, as long as they were the same price. That was easy.

Then because the scanning was tied into the ordering, they told us we could still enter in a quantity for however many were the same flavor/variety/whatever, if they were all different we had to scan each one.

Then of course they realized nobody really cared enough to do this since it was a hassle and they were still ringing up like 48 cans of different flavor cat food as one thing. So they said "fine you can't have nice things" and disabled the quantity key totally, unless you had the supervisor do an override. So blame lazy cashiers.

Sorry, but there must be some solid grammatical reason why "fewer than 15 dollars" is incorrect, rather than it doesn't sound right, or oh, let's not be toooooo pedantic.

In maths, it's "less than" and never "fewer than", even for integers, which are discrete. Is maths technically grammatically incorrect?

I mean, the number 14 is less than the number 15 (which is written as 14 < 15). It's not fewer than it, it's less than it. Either that's grammatically incorrect, or it has some bearing on why "fewer than 15 dollars" might be incorrect.

Why must there be? Language is socially constructed and rules and meanings change. There are many grammatical rules in English that were made up in the Victorian era to try to make English more closely match Latin (such as not splitting an infinitive), when English isn't even a Romance language. Most grammar rules though, are just codification of how the cognoscenti use the language.

Usually, numbers aren't things to be counted.

Now you've put a "than" in there and changed the whole structure. Nobody has given an opinion on that before your post unless I missed it.

I would say fewer or less used here have two different meanings and both can be correct. Less would be talking about a singular amount of money, while fewer might imply talking about counting dollar bills (context matters). If you mean money generally, then "less" is still better and the meaning is clear.

The cognoscenti like their rules to be consistent, don't they? If "fewer than 15 dollars" is incorrect then there appears to be some inconsistency at work here.


Interesting. I can't imagine why the Victorians would want to do this. Do you have a reference?

This reminds me of a comic I saw once. The sign says "15 items or less" and the cashier refused to ring up customer, explaining that the box of cereal had about 300 flakes in it, the pack of gum had 25 pieces in it, the soda had 15 million atoms in it...

Gotta leap for the stars, you know?

"There were 100 people at the bar, more or fewer."

"You didn't need to buy a dining set with 10 chairs. You could live with fewer than that!"

"I brought ten cakes. Turned out to be fewer than I needed" Or "I could have brought fewer."

Nope. No one talks like this.

I forget, do you use them for sportsball? "Utah Jazz is playing the Lakers today"? Surely not, sounds hideous.

Usually, team names are said with "the" in front of them, so you'd say "The Jazz are playing the Lakers today."

Sign in West Virginia market: "About 36 items or less." I thought it made sense, given the "about."

Years ago, while in the express lane with my wife, a woman jumped in front of us with well over the limit of 12 items (we had 4). And the cashier needed to call the manager three times for price checks. On the third price check, I was pissed. I lit up a cigarette and glared at the woman with thirty-some items in her cart. The cashier informed me that I couldn't smoke inside. I asked if there was a sign, which she indicated. I indicated the sign that read "12 items or less," told her it should say "fewer," and asked which sign I should believe.

My wife was pissed.

Right, but it's "are", is my point.

Usually the teams' nicknames are plural (Bulls, Lakers, Celtics). Jazz is treated the same for whatever reason (convenience, continuity, ignorance).

She was passive smoking and you were passive aggressive. Seems fair.