A Word, Please: One less reason to trust the news media

Robert Siegel of National Public Radio, Jason Stallman of the New York Times and every other journalist who uses “fewer” with confidence, please take a seat. You’re about to get a lesson in language that you didn’t think you needed. There’s a gaping hole in your grammar skills — a shocking shortcoming smack dab in your blind spot.

But more shocking yet is who’s about to school you — a hair-gelled and coiffed pretty boy who, while he seems too young to get a driver’s license, demonstrated a mastery of grammar that all your years of professional wordsmithing failed to deliver.

Distinguished members of the media, meet your grammar teacher, Justin Bieber.

Your lesson, naturally, comes in the form of a song, which you can find on YouTube by searching for the title “One Less Lonely Girl.” The second word of that title is the crux of our lesson: the difference — the real difference — between “less” and “fewer.”

I was hoping to spare you this indignity. In fact, weeks ago in this column I offered a quick primer on this matter, though I omitted its inspiration: Siegel. In a report on healthcare a few months back, Siegel said that doctors in certain rural areas make “fewer than one house call” per week.

With this error in mind, I explained a common misconception about the difference between “less” and “fewer” and how to get these two words right.

I had spoken my piece, shared the news you can use and moved on. So, a few weeks later, when I heard a reporter from another newspaper use “one fewer” during a radio interview, I smiled at the coincidence but didn’t jot down his name or newspaper.

Then, just two days after that, I heard New York Times sports editor Jason Stallman commenting on NBC’s “Nightly News” about player injuries in women’s soccer.

“The coaches have to make a tactical decision,” Stallman said. “If they want to pull that player off, do they use up one of their three substitutions for the rest of the match? Or do they just play it with one fewer player?”

Amid this rash of high-level “fewer” misfires, it’s clear that a full explanation is called for.

This lesson isn’t for everyone. It’s only for people who want to observe a distinction between “less” and “fewer.” Everyone else can abide by the dictionary, which says “less” can be used as a synonym of “fewer.”

But Siegel, Stallman and the other journalist made clear that they want to go the conservative route, treating these two words as distinct. They just don’t know how.

“Here is the rule as it is usually encountered,” Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage says. “‘Fewer’ refers to number among things that are counted, and ‘less’ refers to quantity or amount among things that are measured.”

According to this guideline, when you have less money, you have fewer dollars. When there’s less kindness in the world, there are fewer kind acts.

“This rule is simple enough and easy enough to follow. It has only one fault — it is not accurate for all usage,” Merriam’s says.

For example, if you’re in the express lane, it’s most proper to say that this lane is for customers buying 10 items or fewer. But if you have 11 items in your cart and you take one out, you don’t have one fewer item. You have one less item.

Why? Because the real difference between these two words is this: “Less” modifies singular nouns and fewer modifies plural nouns. If three items are removed from your cart, you end up with fewer items. But if just one is taken out, there’s one less item. That’s because “items” is plural and “item” is singular.

If only more wordsmiths could be like Bieber, using “less” to modify singular nouns, there’d be one less lonely grammar columnist tonight.

JUNE CASAGRANDE is author of “The Best Punctuation Book, Period.” She can be reached at [email protected].