This "rule" is really just bull, in my opinion. http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/10-items-or-less-is-just-fine/ http://motivatedgrammar.wordpre

This "rule" is really just bull, in my opinion. http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/10-items-or-less-is-just-fine/ http://motivatedgrammar.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/10-items-or... 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.