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ImageSMART TALK
by Clara Dix

AMOUNT OF:  Mary Bleeker came all the way from Wisconsin for a weekend at Warriner House, the the Institute for the Linguistically Impaired in Underbelly, Texas.  She got a ten percent discount for offering this sentence to treat patients for:  "The amount of people attending the meeting was less than last time."

Maybe the amount of coffee was less, but the number of people was smaller. 

Ms Bleeker's contribution is a compound example of the less/fewer strain of cerebroporosis.  The confusion of "amount" and "number" is less common but just as serious as using "less" instead of "fewer," but her sentence handily demonstrates that the impairment is about numbers, or their absence.

If your subject can be counted, it involves numbers, not amounts, which are always fewer, not less.  Is that clear?

I suppose, however, now that a sitting President and a Vice Presidential candidate of the same party have almost made linguistic impairment patriotic, I should ask, "Is that cular?"

After all, they think the "clear" in "nuclear" is pronounced "cular," so cularly, we should be consistent.  That way, we'd make less mistakes.

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