Fewer or Less?

So, you’re in a check-out line in a grocery store. You have seven items in your cart. You count them, because – above the checkout conveyor – you notice a sign: 12 ITEMS OR LESS, the sign advises. Then the realization hits: “I HATE THIS PLACE,” you scream and, with dozens of shoppers looking on, you throw everything in your cart every which way and stalk out of the store, now yelling “THE WHOLE WORLD IS GOING TO HELL!” The problem? The sign should have read, 12 ITEMS OR FEWER, a mistake not made in Safeway stores, I’m told. Assuming something like this hasn’t yet happened to you, it could be you sometimes ask yourself, “I wonder if I should be taking less pills or fewer pills?” And, if it has happened to you, clearly you know how to use the two words properly, but, were I you, I’d be taking more pills, not fewer. Why not “less pills”? For two reasons.

The first reason: “Pills” is not a collective, in the sense that “money” or “water” is, in that – given how “pills” is used in the sentence – one could easily count how many pills are involved; e.g., one pill twice a day. So, no collective: fewer. The collective form of pills? For our purposes, that would be “medicine” and, because “medicine” is a collective, “I wonder if I should be taking less medicine?” is the correct question.

The second reason: singular vs. plural, which is closely aligned with the collective concept; e.g.: You have less money [singular] than the other guy, because you have fewer dollars [plural].

Note that, in some cases, either word is correct, but the word you use changes the meaning of what you say. Consider this:

 The judge gave him a small fine: less than one-thousand dollars.

 The judge gave him a small fine: fewer than one-thousand dollars.

While B sounds awkward, it’s legitimate, assuming you used it intentionally to create the certain image you wanted to create, and which A cannot do. The image? In this case, that of a person – the offender, no doubt – sitting at a table and counting money, one one-dollar bill at a time. Usually one writes a check or uses a credit card for a less-than-one-thousand-dollar fine, but – counting out the money one one-dollar bill at a time – one could only hope that a lot fewer than 1,000 of them would be needed. (By the way, the judge now gives out far [fewer? less?], less-than-one-thousand-dollar fines. I’m told $25 is the new, going rate for grammarianicide.)

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