Fewer VS Less

Use Fewer not Less with Countable Nouns

I hate to be the fuddy old guy who goes around telling people how they should talk.  Usually I'm the one defending people in the lower classes from the scorn of the elitists who try to proscribe how English should work.  After all, everyone's English is technically correct, right?  Who's to say that "I'm a go get some pizza" is any worse than "I will get some pizza"?

That as it may be, there is one new thing that is creeping into the language more and more that just drives me nuts.  Here's an example.

There are less people on the train today than yesterday.

Did you catch the mistake?  If not, then you need to stick around and read to the end of this post so you (English native speaker or no) can be corrected in how to use proper English.  First we have the idea that some nouns can be counted and some can not.

Countable:  flowers

Uncountable: flour

Words that are not countable don't necessarily have to go with objects that can not be physically counted.  You can, if you desire, count the hair on your head or the grains of sand on the beach but both hair and sand are usually uncountable for the simple reason that nobody every really wants to do that.  (save for some intern given busy work).

Other words can be counted and thus are used in a plural. You can have one flower and you can have two flowers.  You can have one child or two children.  Even if the word does not change in the plural such as one fish or two fish, the fact of the matter is that the word is still being used in the plural since it is used to denote more than one of something.

If we want to say that we had a certain amount in the past and that amount increased to a larger amount then it is very easy.  In English we used the same word.

There is more sand on the beach today than yesterday.

There are more flowers in the park today than yesterday. 

Of course you should be mindful to notice the verb switches from singular to plural as a big tip off that even though both examples use "more" there is still something different about them.

Now you might be tempted to think that if we use the same word for both countable and uncountable to talk about an increase then why can't we use the same word to talk about a decrease?  That is a good question and the answer is, we just don't.  From a purely objective point a view there is now reason why "There are fewer flowers in the park" should be any more or less correct than "There less flowers in the park".  I concede the point that if we had to explain why to aliens visiting us we would be hard pressed to do so.

However, this isn't just a grammar issue, it is a social issue.  This is not the case of new grammar or slightly different grammar happening at the lower levels of society or among people learning the language as a second language and the higher levels wanting to stamp it out.  This simple grammatical mistake is one that the rich and powerful have adopted to show inclusion in their own group and as a way to exclude other from that group.  Now, people have the right to speak the way they want to but replacing "Fewer" with "Less" can not be justified simply because rich people want to force the way of speaking on everyone else, or to allow snobs and elitists to put a fence around themselves.

Looking through our data sources, normal people are still using "fewer" perfectly correctly and most people who reach a certain level of competence with English as a second language do as well.  The places you see "Less" used incorrectly are Ted Talks where the rich and powerful give lectures to each other to reinforce their status with one another.  You also hear it from celebrities when they give interviews.  You can even note that certain celebrities used "Fewer" correctly in the past around when they first became famous but changed they way they talked after becoming very rich.  Twitter is a wonderful source of data for this where we still see most people correctly using "Fewer" but again we see wealthy or famous people forgetting the word exists.

So in conclusion, we can say that "less apples" is wrong because the vast majority of English speakers say it's wrong and if rich people want to introduce this deliberate and very ugly error into their speech then they need to keep it to themselves and learn that when you speak publicly you will be held to a higher standard and that standard is to at the minimum use correct grammar with countable and uncountable nouns.  If "less apples" is to be deemed correct because a movie star starts saying it then next we'll see them force us to say "fewer water" and at that point we might as all trade in our dollars for Dodge Coins.

There is less water in the pool today.

There are FEWER flowers in the garden today.