No. Your formulation is not incorrect, but pg's is correct as it stands. The word "less" has been used in a range of English dialects for both countable and m

No. Your formulation is not incorrect, but pg's is correct as it stands. The word "less" has been used in a range of English dialects for both countable and measurable things, for more than a thousand years. See e.g. http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.h... for some excellent discussion on this issue, and actual corpus data to back it up.