Less / Fewer

Ann Marie's post below reminded me of a grammatical error that always bugs me. Ok, there are many of these, but here's one I've seen/heard a lot recently and it makes me angry to hear it misused. Inappropriate reaction? Yes. Ergo, Strong Judgment / Trivial Matter.

One has LESS of an item that can't be counted, but FEWER of something that can be (except in cases of continuous measurement, where less is acceptable, but we can ignore that for the moment).

For example: "There is less traffic now because of the recession" versus "there are fewer cars on the road now because of the recession."

(one can, in theory, count cars. One cannot count traffic).

Money is another exception, one can say that you have less than ten dollars. This is both because of the continuous measurement exception noted above and also because money is in itself a symbol, generally referring to a value as opposed to the actual number of bits of paper in your hand (in which case one might have fewer than ten dollar bills).

Coming soon: amount v. number in common usage.