Less is more

The language police are on patrol again - and this time they've got Tesco under surveillance. As this BBC News article explains, there are those who object to the grammatical inaccuracy of the "10 items or less" sign that appears on some checkouts, arging that 'fewer' is the correct term to use in this context:

Both words are used as comparatives - fewer meaning "a smaller number of", less
meaning "a smaller amount or quantity of"... Fewer should be used when you are
talking about items that can be counted individually, for example, "fewer than
10 apples". Less is correct when quantities cannot be individually counted in
that case, e.g. "I would like less water".

So we return once again to the presecriptivist debate. Grammatical pedants (and I hold my hands up to being one of them on this particular occasion, the confusion between 'less' and 'fewer' being one of my own language 'niggles') strive for technical accuracy, while their more linguistically liberal counterparts might argue that nobody is confused by the supposedly inaccurate "10 items or less" so why bother about it? All good fuel for the language debates furnace.