10 Items or Less?

Ah, there are so many grammar mistakes that one encounters on a daily basis. Some are seriously offensive and others intrude upon daily life because people don’t know the rules. These intrusions screech and scratch at my eardrums on many occasions.

The usual grammar suspect today has to do with countable and non-countable nouns. What in God’s green earth am I talking about now? Some nouns – you know, those words that are often the subjects of our sentences – are divided into ones that you can count (One Brad Pitt, Two Brad Pitt? etc). While others are so small or in quantities that you can’t count – such as sand, rice or milk. These items are known as non-countable nouns. Let me give you a list of some:
Milk, Money, Water, Coffee, Air, Bread, Snow, Sugar, Salk, Hair, Food, Clothing, Candy.

Now, when it comes to these non-countable nouns and expressing comparisons in situations where your quantity is smaller than another person’s, you use ‘less’ to describe that quantification. For instance, you would say ‘I have less money than Oprah and less water than Evian and less coffee in my cup than Juan Valdez’. But if you can count an item (usually it will have an -s on the end in the plural form), then a negative comparison would be ‘I have fewer eggs in my basket than Foghorn Leghorn’ or ‘she has fewer freckles than Howdy Doody’.

The title of this blog is actually incorrect. Items are things that can be counted so the signs in every English speaking grocery store should say 10 items or fewer or whatever the quantity of items or fewer.

As I used to tell my ESL students, English is so hard that native speakers always make mistakes and this is one super faux-pas in my book.

When thinking about non-countable nouns, there are 4 categories in which they fall:
1) Nouns that have no distinct separate parts. Look at the whole: Milk, Oil, Water, Yogurt, Air, Soup, Bread, Butter
2) Nouns that have parts that are so small or insignificant to count: Rice, Sugar, Salt, Snow, Sand, Corn, Popcorn, Hair, Junk, Stuff.
3) Nouns that are categories of things – the members of the category are not the same: Money (dimes, pennies, dollars, etc.), Food (cookies, veggies, meat, etc.), Mail (letters, postcards, bills, etc), Clothing, Furniture, Makeup, Candy.
4) Abstract Nouns: Love, Time, Truth, Advice, Luck, Beauty, Fun, Information, Noise, Intelligence, Experience, Art, Work, Education, Noise.