Grammar Nerd Wednesday: Ten Brain Cells or Less

This is part of an ongoing series of posts designed to make everyone think I'm a colossal prick because of my grammatical specificity. These posts are either me lecturing the masses about how to properly use grammar/punctuation/the rules of the English language, or me figuring out for myself, textually, the aforementioned.  They will run every Wednesday.  If you run afoul of these rules, rest assured, even though I judge you for your poor grammar, I'm still a lesser being than you.

I am fascinated by grocery stores, including all of the studies to market products to us.  Shelf height is based on average eye level of men and women, with the most valuable shelf space being that which is at eye level.  It works, too. How many times have you made a random purchase where you had to bend your waist at more than a 45 degree angle, or strain to reach the top shelf? There are the Malt-O-Meal bagged cereals which briefly made an ad campaign out of walking like a duck to buy their product from off of the bottom shelf, but clearly that hasn’t exactly gone gangbusters for them.  I am always acutely aware of which brand of Soda is on special each week, so I can prepare to buy either four twelve packs of Pepsi or Dr Pepper for ten dollars (they alternate between Pepsi and Coke/Dr. Pepper product sales most weeks.)

The Grocery Store is actually more science than it seems, and is a very sophisticated place.  You may be surprised to discover that Kraft owns Polly-O cheese, as well as other generic brands that you pass over, so as to take up shelf space and edge out competitors like Sargento.  Given all of this angling, research, and investment in the sophistication of the supermarket, it’s hard to believe they have one glaringly idiotic thing in their stores, one that exists in most supermarkets: the semi-employable, half-drunk seventeen year olds with purple hair and sleeve tats that glare at you for making them work.  Kidding; I am referring to the express lane: “Ten Items or Less.”

There are two reasons why this is idiotic, the first of which is the long form, grammatical reason, and the second of which is that there is a far easier, and grammatically sound, way to convey that message.  “Ten Items or Less” gets at the heart of the “Less vs. Fewer” argument.  The nitty gritty of the argument is whether or not saying “Ten Items or Less” is a countable quantity or not.  I’m getting ahead of myself.

Less and Fewer are both used in reference to amount, be it volume, mass, size, weight, measurement, and the like.  The difference is that less is reserved for mass nouns, or amounts that are non-specific.  “There is less crime in gentrified neighborhoods.”  Crime, as a mass noun, is encompassing of all individual instances of crime in the neighborhoods in question.

Fewer refers to countable objects, or individual objects that can be counted and grouped appropriately.  “There are fewer pistol-whippings in all of the Netherlands than in Detroit” is correct because pistol-whippings are a singular event that can be counted and grouped appropriately to form a known amount.

Understanding this and applying it to the Grocery store, the sign is referring to a specific and countable number of items in your cart – do you have ten items?  Or fewer than ten items? Come on in!  The lonely, geriatric shut-in who, after the financial meltdown of 2008, lost the house her husband built fifty years ago with his own two hands, will be glad to ring you out at a snail’s pace.

In fact, many grocery stores have altered the verbiage on their sign to reflect this trend, instead advising others that the Express Checkout is “Ten Items or Fewer.”  Well, problem solved, right?  FUCKING WRONG, YOU BRAINLESS HEATHEN!

The placement of fewer is incorrect.  As a rule, the modifier should be placed next to what it intends to modify.  Read with a keen grammatical eye, “Ten Items or Fewer” actually means “Ten items, or objects that are ‘fewer than’ an item.”  This, of course, sends most shoppers in the United States, particularly in Arkansas and the panhandle region of Florida, into a metaphysical panic attack regarding what constitutes fewer than an item.  Is the entire Activia six-pack, connected by that hard plastic lip at the top of the container an “item?”  Should I snap them apart and buy only five of them?  That’d be fewer than an item, but it would also increase the total number of whole or “fewer” items; and do I really need to shit like Jamie Lee Curtis that much? I know that all of you are participating in close readings of bland public guidelines for expedient consumerism, but we need specificity and accuracy in our diction, people!

The correct phrasing should be “Ten or fewer items.”  The fewer would modify the amount, meaning the shopper doesn’t have to come in with exactly ten items.  There are two reasons this entire article is completely and utterly idiotic, one of which is on the stores, and the other of which is my own.

First, the stores could alleviate this problem by avoiding such arcane and confusing language anyway.  You know how you can say “Ten or Fewer Items” in a way that doesn’t look cumbersome or confusing to the slack-jawed mouth breathers pacing your aisles and humming Phil Collins songs at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday?  It’s very, very simple:

“NO MORE THAN TEN ITEMS.”  Holy fucking shit!  Super God-damned easy!  Or how about “Maximum Ten Items,” or maybe “Ten Item Limit”  That would work!  Why are we doing this dance of the sugarplum idiots with this “Ten Items or Less/Fewer?”  Are we clinging to this word order and choice because of nostalgia and a way to say “fuck you” to Obama-loving Harvard?  What in the holy hell is wrong with us?

Additionally, the other reason this entire missive is colossally idiotic?  WHO THE FUCK ACTUALLY PAYS ATTENTION TO THE TEN ITEM LIMIT?  I’ve seen people with entire carts in the self-checkout express lane fumbling with their hot dog fingers on the touch screen like they’ve never used an ATM or been to a Disney World information Kiosk trying to enter PLU codes for their avocados they will in no way eat before it rots on their counter. Put them in the fridge, people – the fridge is like the pause button for avocado ripening!  All this verbiage, and a change from “less” to “fewer,” and prickish Americans are still ramming forty four items into the Express lane while the minimum wage runaway at the Ralphs on Sunset Boulevard tweets about how inconsiderate people are while continuing to ring them out.

This is why I need to think about these peccadillos less.  Phew.