10 Items or Less

In this series of blogs, Writing Woes, I will share with you some amusing insights on the mistakes people inadvertently make when writing, based on my work as a professional tutor and as a writer for Summit University. (You can visit my tutoring website here: https://lynnthetutor.com)

Here we go!

10 Items or Less

Can vs. May

I was a child at a time when families sat down to dinner together every night. And when the meal was finished, a child was expected to ask the hostess, usually the mother, for permission to leave the table. My mother was a stickler for good grammar.

“Can I be excused, please?”

“It’s may I be excused!”

Mother explained: “May speaks to permission, can talks about ability. I’m sure you are able to stand up and leave the table. Before you do that you need my permission; the correct word is may, not can.”

I meet many people who don’t know the difference between the uses of those two words. If I had a time machine, I could invite them to dinner with me back then. My mother would have set them straight.

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Sit vs. Set

Sit is what you do—you sit in a chair, or on the beach, or under a tree to read a book at lunch time. 

Set is what you do with the eight grocery bags you carried in from the car all at once; you set them on the floor and shake out your hands, and it’s what delivery people do with the package they leave on your porch; they set it down. 

These are the original and most usual usages of sit and set.

Set has taken on a number of uses that don’t require an object—hens set; dogs that are setters set; and every night the sun blushes as it sets with no object at all.

But look at this:

I’ll set here and wait.

Ouch.

This wrong usage is a classic indicator of an uneducated person. Read any good novel written at least twenty years ago. The antagonist, or the comic relief, or the hick from the back country is distinguished in dialogue from the more educated characters by this use of the verb set. There will be more wrong words, but the ignorant using set instead of sit is universal.

It’s truly sad that so many of the young authors I read don’t know this and  put set wrongly into the mouths of their supposedly well educated and intelligent protagonists. 

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Less vs. Fewer

This should be an easy one—less talks about quantity and fewer talks about things that can be counted.

Hey! You gave me less soup than him.

Hey! You gave me fewer quarters than him.

That’s the right way to do it.

And there are a plethora of wrong ways to do it: 

No less than 60 flamingos just flew by.

State the reasons in 100 words or less.

She has 300 pairs of shoes, more or less.

He has less than $1000.

Easter is less than seven days away.

It is less than 400 miles to Boston.

Fewer would be the better word in each instance above. But these usages have become so common that grammatical experts have begun to throw up their hands in surrender and claim that perhaps these wrong usages are not so horribly wrong as to require condemnation and correction.

So these days it’s up to you to decide how correct you wish to be. 

Depending upon your decision, you may or may not feel it is essential to carry a marker to the supermarket to correct the sign that says “10 items or less.”

From Lynn’s Medium Account.

Lynn The Tutor

(My tutoring website: https://lynnthetutor.com)