> Less has been used this way for well over a thousand years—nearly as long as there's been a written English language. But for more than 200 years almost every usage writer and English teacher has declared such use to be wrong. The received rule seems to have originated with the critic Robert Baker, who expressed it not as a law but as a matter of personal preference. Somewhere along the way—it's not clear how—his preference was generalized and elevated to an absolute, inviolable rule. ...
> Despite the rule, less used of things that are countable is standard in many contexts, and in fact is more likely than fewer in a few common constructions, especially ones involving distances (as in "less than three miles"), sums of money (as in "less than twenty dollars"), units of time and weight (as in "less than five years" and "less than ten ounces"), and statistical enumerations (as in "less than 50,000 people")—all things which are often thought of as amounts rather than numbers. ...
