More often than not in grocery stores and other retail establishments, you'll see express lanes with signs specifying that they're for purchases of "X items or less." Hold on to your handheld device, reader: This is an incorrect construction; these signs should say "X items or fewer." Ready for another bitter pill? Some people whom you love and respect probably get this wrong, too. Did the majority of American students somehow miss class the day teachers explained the difference between "less" and "fewer"? Do schools still require their charges to understand the basics of English? Can anyone with children weigh in here?

The Grammarly blog clearly lays out the rules regarding "less" and "fewer."

Fewer means “not as many.” We use fewer with countable nouns like cookies.

Example: Cookie Monster was told to eat fewer cookies.

Less means “not as much.” We use less with uncountable nouns like milk.

Example: Could you give Cookie Monster less milk next time?

Kathryn and Ross Petras, authors of the 2018 book That Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means: The 150 Most Commonly Misused Words and Their Tangled Histories, observed that even the Washington Post has bungled the usage in a headline: "Start-ups are leaving the heartland are employing less people." The Petrases go on to report that the Oxford English Corpus found that "less people" was used 21 percent of the time. (Unless the OEC is omniscient, its conclusion seems suspect, but given my own experience, it probably checks out.)

Of course, there are more pressing problems in the world than botched linguistic usages. But it's baffling that something so easy to grasp so often gets misused. Zoom out from the micro-idiocy of this mistake to the macro-stupidity of not understanding basic concepts about how language works and it ultimately leads to millions of ordinary American citizens thinking that Trump, McConnell, and Ryan have their best interests at heart. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to have a word with QFC's manager.