104. Fewer Amounts

“Barcelona have a great club. But in 200 years of history they have won the European Cup only once. I have been managing for a few years and I have already won the same amount.”   

You may know or can guess who said that and you may also have spotted that there are at least two grammatical errors: 'have' (should be 'has') and 'amount' (should be 'number'). The speaker may be forgiven, however, because he is Portuguese. Jose Mourinho, as modest as ever, was speaking in what is for him, his second language.

I was lying in bed one Saturday morning shortly after Christmas, listening to the Today programme on Radio 4.  I had almost gone back to sleep, made drowsy listening to the thoughts and opinions of some long retired professional footballer whose passing skills twenty years ago had shown much more insight into the game than his thoughts do nowadays, when suddenly I was wide awake. 

I heard the presenter, Sarah Montague, who was interviewing a hospital administrator about overcrowding in A & E.  She said,

“Your figures for the amount of patients that you see coming through the door….”

The following morning I was watching Sunday Politics on BBC1 when Patrick McLoughlin, the Minister of Transport, said to Andrew Neal,

“I didn’t sell any (electric cars) but the amount that was sold….”

And then, five minutes later on a different topic, he told Neal,

“We have seen increases in the amount of people using the railways.”

The next day, on Monday morning, again listening to Today, I heard Gordon Corera, the BBC Security Correspondent, speaking on the subject of potential terrorists in France.  He told us that if you speak to French officials,

“they will say one problem is simply due to volume: the amount of people they’re looking at.”

In three consecutive days I had heard three intelligent, educated people, whose jobs demand that they communicate regularly and clearly with the public, using the word ‘amount’ when in my opinion, they should have said, ‘number’.

On Thursday of that same week, Helen King, Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police told her interviewer that,

“….with the amount of Range Rovers stolen in Kensington and Chelsea, officers are now instructed to stop that make of vehicle to see if the legal owner is driving it.”

Footballers often seem to get it wrong.  Terry McDermott, who once played for Liverpool wrote,

“The amount of goals being conceded by Liverpool from set-pieces is a huge worry.”

Steve Claridge on Football Focus told us that the score line in Middlesbrough’s win against Manchester City in a cup match,

“wasn’t a true reflection on the amount of chances they created.”

In 2002 Roy Keane, sometime footballer, talking about his autobiography said,

"The amount of fights I've had in Cork would probably be another book.” 

Maybe the problem lies in the dictionary definitions.  In my dictionary, each word contains the other word in its meaning:

AMOUNT: the total of things in number….

NUMBER: a quantity or amount…..

Someone I know went skiing in Colorado and he wrote on his blog,

“The amount of suitable clothes needed was a problem.”

I resisted the temptation to comment with something like: “The amount of clothing” or “The number of clothes”.  I didn’t because I didn’t want to appear an irritating pedant but another reason was that, maybe, I would not have been right.

Oliver Kamm claimed in his Times column that the insistence on ‘fewer’ for number was a shibboleth of recent invention and should be ignored.  He went on to say that the choice of ‘fewer’ or ‘less’ is about style, not grammar.  Would he argue that also applies to ‘amount’ and number’?

According to the book “Good and Bad English” by Whitten and Whittaker, ‘less’ applies to degree, quantity or extent; ‘fewer’ to number and surely that rule must apply to ‘amount’ and ‘number’ too.  Just as ‘less’ takes a singular noun (less clothing) and ‘fewer’ a plural noun (fewer clothes), so it must be ‘the amount of clothing’ and ‘the number of clothes’.

But is that the case?  At the AGM of the Queen's English Society in 2013, I asked the guest speaker, the renowned grammarian, N M Gwynne, “When speaking to a monotheistic believer, should I, as an atheist, say that I believe in one less god than you or one fewer?”

  “Fewer” was his immediate response and he was dismissive of my contention that as ‘god’ is a singular noun in that context, it should be “one less”.  I tried to argue that “one less god” would be incorrect if I were talking to a Hindu or a person from some other polytheistic religion, but not if I were talking to a Christian or a Moslem who believe there is only one god.  Apparently I was wrong.

Does it really matter?  No, I don’t think it does.  I have heard it said that ‘fewer’ (clothes) is what educated people think educated people say, and so anyone saying ‘less’ risks being thought of as ignorant. 

The purpose of language is to communicate clearly, accurately and understandably, one’s thoughts, ideas, emotions, demands, hopes, instructions and desires.  I cannot envisage any situation when lives would be lost, money goes astray, an army is defeated or chaos ensues because someone said ‘amount’ when he or she should (possibly) have said ‘number’.

But it always jars with me!

"The amount of people who don't turn out at general elections"

Allegra Stratton, BBC Radio 4, February 2nd 2015