Tesco are coming to terms with a mistake that's pissed me off for a while. At least it's a step in the right direction, but what pisses me off is that there is any sort of dispute at all. 10 items or less will NEVER be grammatically correct.
"Saying up to 10 items is easy to understand and avoids any debate," said a spokesman for The Plain English Campaign.
"Fewer" should be used when you are talking about items that can be counted individually, for example, "fewer than 10 apples".
"Less" is correct when quantities cannot be individually counted in that case, e.g. "I would like less water".
Except, morons, that a quantity is always measured in some form at a supermarket, or you wouldn't be able to distinguish between a lot and a little of something and rip us off accordingly. Water is bottled, meat is sold by weight in pieces, etc. But that's not even the main point. The main point is that an item is definitively a partitive, discrete value. Therefore it must ALWAYS be 10 items or fewer, because you cannot have less items. Let's hope the other supermarkets have the balls to go the whole hog...
I have missed these rants :D
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