I have less patience and fewer friends

All this attention being paid to low-carbohydrate diets isn’t doing much for the English language . This morning I watched a commercial in which the talking head was praising some product for having “70 percent less carbs.” Less? Yo, buddy, less is applied to quantity, as in, “I am 70 percent more illiterate than my fellow broadcasters.” Fewer is the word you want, as in, “I have fewer working brain cells than my fellow broadcasters.”

As Rebecca Elliott says in one of my favorite grammar books, “Painless Grammar” (Barron’s, 264 pages, $8.95 paper). “If you can count them, use fewer . If you can’t count them, use less .”