I posted it because when people get it wrong it's nearly always because they use less where they should have used fewer.
Funny, isn't it. It's been so fashionable for so long for pedants to complain about supermarkets using the "X items or less" formulation that it seems to have become a popular fixed idea that "less" must
always be wrong.
People have the same trouble with "I" or "me", incorrectly using "I" when they should use "me". This seems to arise from them being corrected as a child when using "me" wrongly and therefore thinking that "I" is always correct - probably because they weren't told (or just didn't understand)
why "me" was wrong on those occasions.
But yeah, whatever, I can live with it. Some people don't know the difference between a subject and an object. So what. The only time it really grates is when they do it in set phrases, such as "Between you and I". I have a colleague who says this all the time, and in his job (subediting), he really ought to have a better grasp of basic grammar. Ooh, it makes my skin crawl.
d.