Originally Posted by
Luis Anaconda
:shrug: It's perfectly acceptable to say that whatever the dwindling band of pedants who wish to appear clever would like to claim.
"Less has been used with countables for about a thousand years — pretty much the entire history of written English. The very notion of a neat distinction between fewer and less according to whether the noun is countable or not is a myth. It was invented out of whole cloth by an ill- informed 18th-century pedant called Robert Baker in his book Reflections on the English Language (1770). He proposed this distinction not as a hard-and-fast rule of grammar, moreover, but as a tentative suggestion with caveats (“I should think . . . it appears to me . . . ”) that you won’t find in modern style guides."
