Does less mean more?

A helpful guide on bbc.co.uk/news says: 'Less' means 'not as much'. 'Fewer' means 'not as many'. 'Fewer' when items that can be counted individually. Confused? You will be.

This week Tesco have announced that it's changing the signs at some of its checkouts because of a grammatical error. The '10 items or less' aisle is now set to become 'up to 10 items'. Is it just me, or is this less (or should that be fewer) clear? Up to ten, it that up to and including 10? Or fewer than ten? So no more than nine? So just nine?

Whatever it is, I can sort of understand the reasoning behind it. If you write for a living like we do here at Gemini PR, you might be a bit of a grammar geek and enjoy pointing out glaring mistakes on public signs. Don't these people check what they write?

I'll always remember a sign about good behaviour which was put up in all the classrooms at my old school. It was written by the Headmaster and, embarrassingly for him, was full of grammatical errors - which the pupils gleefully corrected in red pen throughout the school.

Should it really be up to pupils, or more frequently, the Plain English Campaign to tell adults in professional jobs that their writing isn't correct? If schools don't teach this properly, the likelihood is that the situation will only get worse as computer grammar checkers make us even lazier.

Helen

p.s I would very much appreciate it if you didn't check this blog post for grammatical errors....