So MPs have voted to lucubrate less. To lucubrate fewer? To sit for fewer midnight hours. To work less antisocial hours. To have less/fewer late nights. And to take fewer/less long vacs — Oops! Sorry!!! To undertake fewer important subsidised research projects in sunny parts of the world. I wish that they had voted for fewer MPs and to pass less legislation (particularly concerning tax returns sarcastically described as Do-It-Yourself self-assessment). But that would be expecting plum puddings to vote for Christmas with brandy butter and crackers.

After the superstitious ban against splitting infinitives, the distinction between few and less is one of the very few “rules” of grammar that every Englishman pats himself on his hairy back for knowing. Dimly we remember Old Chalky drumming the rule into our heads, which were still aching from simultaneous quadratic equations. We know the rule. It has been beaten into us. “Few” goes with countables, ie, with nouns that have both a singular and a plural form.

Newspaper/ newspapers. MP/MPs. Fewer politicians, few politicians, a few politicians — we should be so lucky. Few also goes with collective nouns: fewer people, few people, a few people. By contrast, less is properly used with uncountables or mass nouns. Less is the comparative of little. It refers to quantity. It is the opposite of more. Less legislation, less politics, less grumps, less misery.

Indignant Notting Hill pedants (precisians, purists, sanctimonious hypocrites) have just forced the local supermarket to relabel its fast lane checkout “Fewer than ten items” instead of “Less than ten items”. A triumph for correct grammar? Well, up to a point, Lord Correctitude. Or, to be honest on the other side of the check-out, balderdash and bullslop.

Let us address this idiom using your rules. “My house is fewer than five miles from the station. So it takes the taxi fewer than 15 minutes to take me there. And it costs fewer than £5.” What prat would say that? In each case idiom cries out for “less”, not “fewer”. The answer is that less can be (is) idiomatically used instead of few in certain circumstances. For example, distances, sums of money (costs less than £100), or other statistical enumerations. The notion of quantity is present in each case. Less than £50. Less than six months. Less is correct with numbers giving the size of a quantity. School examiners invite candidates to write a precis of a piece of prose in 50 words, or less. Editors ask hacks to write less than 830 words. Hacks seldom oblige. How many miles to Babylon? Less than 1,000. How many wise men in Babylon? Fewer than five, and that’s not counting Saddam Hussein.

The notion of the simple few/less distinction is a convention invented in the 18th century. It has become correct, and a rule of English grammar. But rules, like piecrust, are made to be broken. English is a great loch in which elephants can swim, lambs can paddle and hamsters can lay down the law. There is old historical justification for using “less” with countables, even though the idiom sets modern teeth on edge. In Old English such uses arise, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, from “the construction of LESS adverbial (quasi-substantive) with a partitive genitive”: literally “less of words”. When the genitive plural case vanished at the end of the Old English period, the type “less (thingies)” took its place. And there have been good writers ever since who have used “less” incorrectly. John Lyly, Magdalen, Oxford, boy, who also studied at Cambridge: “There are few Universities that have less faults than Oxford.” I dare say Lyly was using elegant variation to avoid repeating “few”. But he was a good flashy writer, the inventor of the OTT showing-off style of prose called euphuism. Martin Amis and Jonathan Meades are artists of his school.

The “wrong” use of less is prevalent and growing. I suspect that “less” is felt to be more demotic, less pompous and less self-consciously correct than “few”. In ordinary conversation, some people perhaps feel that “less” is a more informal word than “fewer”, and talk about less radishes. That fierce purist Kingsley Amis ruled: “This (error) is forgivable if you like the people.” Forgiveness is generous.

Without a prefixed word, “few” usually implies antithesis with “many”. Whereas in “a few”, “some few”, the antithesis is with “none at all”.

Grammar, like the rest of language (like the rest of life), continually changes. Let us resolve to change with it, grumbling if we must. “Like” is taking the place of “as if”. “Less” is chasing “few(er)” out. Less purists. Less MPs. The change is happening under our eyes and through our ears. We do not have to make the change ourselves — yet. We can carry on, with our poor, harassed supermarket, using few and less more or less correctly without sounding archaic. But the change is happening.

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