MAKING FEWER MISTAKES

I've been listening to more news radio than music on my drive to and from work, mainly because the music station DJs annoy me. The drawback to this, of course, is that with less music you get more speech, which just makes me realize many more mistakes than usual.

Less music.
More speech.
Many more mistakes.

Seems fine, does it not? I certainly didn't write "fewer music" or "much more mistakes", did I? Then why would people say it that way? How do people not realize their mistake as soon as they make it?

The "fewer/less" problem has been on my list of peeves for a while. I know, it's hard to believe. In the past, it would crop up every so often, and I'd shudder slightly and let it pass. But now I'm hearing it more and more, and I don't think it's a renewed sensitivity to it -- I think the problem is spreading.

If you're looking for an explanation about the usage of these words, I'll give you my quick version. Some things can be counted. Some cannot. People can be counted, while water cannot. That's right, you can have glasses of water, pools of water, molecules of water, and they're all countable, but water is not. The use of "less" versus "fewer" depends on whether the object is countable or not.

So, you can have less water, but you can't have fewer water. This, I should hope, makes complete sense. Fewer water? And to be honest, I don't think this mistake is made often. But this is becoming all too common: "Less people showed up today than yesterday." To me, this is obviously wrong, glaringly so.

So, why does this happen? My guess is that, with the decline of language and people's vocabulary, they just see "less" and "fewer" as synonyms, and "less" is more common, so it's used all the time. And that's fine.

Well, no, I don't really believe it's fine, but I can accept it, as I know I have to accept all the other errors that are becoming «correct» in today's use. But what I would like to see and hear are professionals, at least, knowing the correct way to write and speak.

And perhaps that's my real issue. More and more, especially on the radio, I'm hearing such poor English. Those same music station DJs that I'm avoiding for their generally annoying morning banter make mistakes all the time. And, I should like to think, they're professionals in the field of public broadcast. Someone has deemed them qualified to speak to an audience.

Sure, live radio should be given some leeway. After all, the majority of it is ad-libbed, so their thought processes might change halfway through saying something, and thus come out incorrect. And I can accept that. But what excuse do the advertisements have? These are pre-recorded. These are, I assume, edited. Edited by editors, who I again assume, are professionals. Is this not their job? Their ONLY job?? Should they not be held accountable, especially to the youth who are going to hear and propagate the mistakes?

Perhaps I just need to make less assumptions.