A reader has written to say, very interestingly, that it seems to him that the distinction between number and amount is currently being lost and that speakers are increasingly using amount in expressions like “the amount of people attending the match” rather than “the number of people”.
I think that I would be inclined to use here myself, reserving amount for singular nouns, as in “the amount of beer drunk at the match”, although it is not always easy to know for certain what one normally says.
But our reader also states he was taught at school that number is used for countable items, like oranges, while amount is used for non-countable things, like water. The fact that he was taught this at school makes me uneasy. Native speakers do not need to be taught the genuine rules of their own language: any rule that has to be overtly taught is not really a rule (for instance “don’t end a sentence with a preposition”).
And while no English speaker would ever say “the number (rather than amount) of water”, it is very easy to find – in the Oxford English Dictionary for instance – clear examples of amount being used with plurals in violation of this so-called “rule”. And this is not a recent phenomenon. Samuel Johnson, the author of the Dictionary of the English Language, wrote in 1751: “If we would know the amount of moments”. And there are many other examples, such as this one from 1884: “The observations are relatively few, compared to the amount of cases in the hospital.”
Our correspondent wonders “what is going on?”, but the answer may perhaps be “nothing”, though we would need to check large amounts (or numbers!) of data and do some counting to be certain.
The same point can be made about fewer and less. There is a similar “rule” here: less, like amount, should apply – some people believe – only to singular nouns, while fewer, like number, applies to plurals: less cheese, less time, less money; but fewer biscuits, fewer minutes, fewer coins.
In fact, however, millions of people do actually say “less biscuits, less drinks”, and the evidence shows that English speakers have always done
this, ever since the time of King Alfred. Again, the OED has very many examples, such as this one from 1580: “I think there are few universities
that have less faults than Oxford, many that have more”.
The “less-fewer rule” was invented at the end of the 18th century by someone who probably had nothing better to worry about. The way the
“rule” is presented shows that the use of fewer versus less is supposed to be a
purely automatic consequence of whether these words modify plural or
singular nouns. And if an alternation is totally automatic, then it is useless:
it does not do any work, and has no significance. After all, what is the opposite of less cheese? More cheese. The opposite of fewer people is more people.
If more works entirely well for both singular and plural, then less can do the same job, and we do not need the word fewer in these contexts. And the same is true of number of oranges versus amount of fruit. “Amount of oranges” has been with us for centuries and will doubtless continue to be so.
WOULD
Samuel Johnson’s phrase “if we would know” illustrates the changing role of
will and its past tense form would over the centuries. The verb will originally
simply meant “want”, but this element of the meaning has increasingly been
lost, so 270 years after Johnson, we are now more likely to write “if we wanted to know”.
