'less' is an acceptable comparative for both countable and uncountable nouns in all modern dialects of English except for US-English, where it's strictly expected that fewer be used for countables.
Perhaps caiob is from the UK, Australia, India, South Africa, New Zealand...
"There is a debate about whether the word should be 'less' or 'fewer'," a campaign spokesman said. "Saying 'up to ten items' is easy to understand and avoids any debate."
and
A Tesco spokesman said: "The debate about what is right has been going on for years now, and I still don't think we know if 'less' or 'fewer' is correct."
That’s odd. I know highly literate people from all of the above, and I’ve never heard any of them misuse less.
Usually the highly literate folks misusing less are from Germany, the Netherlands or Scandinavia. It’s jarring when I hear or see it in otherwise erudite discourse.
Now, I know many native speakers of English in the US and various commonwealth nations that are unaware of the distinction. So I suspect you’re right on the larger point that this particular persnickety rule is dying in the vernacular everywhere. But I’d love to see your source for this rule not being universal in formal speech or when written.
Which mentions the 'rule' started to get pushed around in the 1800s, though 'Less has always been used in English with counting nouns.'
I suppose we'll always be stuck with this ambiguity in English since there's no formal authority to tell us how we should speak/write.
From my own observations, having grown up in Australia and since moved to the US, I must say the common practice is notably different, I almost never heard anyone say fewer in Australia, but have noticed that many Americans (like the poster here) seem to be on a crusade to ensure less isn't 'misused'.
So is this a sign of that horror of horrors, the destruction of the English language by modern speakers who can’t be bothered to learn the rules of the grammar?
Unsurprisingly, no. As it turns out, this whole notion that fewer is countable and less is uncountable has been traced back to 1770 by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English Usage. And it wasn’t a rule back then, but rather a preference of a single author, Robert Baker. (That’s not to say that no one agreed with him, only that no one else seems to have put it in print back then.) So it’s not that modern ne’er-do-wells are ruining the language; at worst, they’re returning it to an earlier state. The OED attests countable less in 1481, derived from an Old English usage attested by no less a personage than King Alfred.
All right. So less used to be fine with countables. Then a dude came along and said he wasn’t fond of that, and his opinion eventually got codified into a rule. But, as MWDEU and the Google results point out, countable less remains common, despite the widespread acceptance of this rule outlawing it. Now, to me, that suggests that the rule that less can’t be used with count nouns is spurious.
Summary: The idea that less can’t be used with count nouns isn’t well supported; it’s a rule that hasn’t ever been strictly followed, especially for count nouns that can be perceived as masses. Groceries lend themselves to perception as a mass, so it’s no surprise that “10 items or less” is favored now, just as it has been historically. Please stop complaining about this.
You're forgetting that not everyone here is from an English speaking country. If you can understand the point he was trying to make, that should be good enough for you.
