The Less/Fewer Police Strike Again

The following is a rant/letter written to an executive of Merck & Co., Inc. regarding their abhorant new campaign for Gardasil, a cervical cancer vaccination.

Ms. Bev Lybrand
Vice President and General Manager
Merck Vaccine Division
Merck & Co., Inc.
One Merck Drive
P.O. Box 100
Whitehouse Station, NJ 08889-0100

Dear Ms. Lybrand,

I am compelled to mute my television or change the station every time I hear or see a commercial from Merck’s current advertising campaign for Gardasil. While this vaccination is wonderful news from a cervical cancer prevention and public health standpoint, your advertising/public relations campaign, “One Less,” is perpetuating the insidious cultural phenomenon of the incorrect usage of English grammar. I shudder to think how many millions of dollars Merck has spent on this infuriating campaign, but the accurate slogan should be “One Fewer.”

Here’s a little refresher from sixth grade English: “Less” is an amount modifier to describe singular mass nouns, that is, quantities of things that can be measured in bulk. “Fewer” is a number modifier used to describe things that can be counted. An example of acceptable grammar usage in your campaign’s copy could be “Using the Gardasil vaccine may mean one fewer teenage girls who develops an embarrassing case of genital warts” or “A decrease in the incidence of human papilloma virus infection among sexually promiscuous youth could result in less cervical cancer later in life.” “Less” should only modify plural nouns when suggesting combination into a unit, group, or aggregation [for example, money (“The three-vaccination treatment is less than $150 per injection.”); time (“You will experience six months or less of pain, swelling, itching, and redness at the injection site.”); and some units of measurement (“I’ll run screaming no less than three miles from my television to avoid hearing that infuriating commercial!”)].

A number of peer-reviewed studies in highly respected medical journals have demonstrated a link between poor education and the increased incidence of disease, particularly some forms of cancer. While developing medications to treat disease is the pharmaceutical industry’s bread and butter, it seems to me that it should be incumbent upon members of the healthcare community to promote better education, including the proper grammatical use of language.

I hope that in the future I will be exposed to fewer of your Gardasil advertisements and thus experience less ire toward your company and the pharmaceutical industry’s direct marketing to consumers.

Sincerely,
Michael S. Johnson

Comments

[Notso Pedantic]

I hope you've had ONE LESS cup of coffee than usual before you read this comment, else you might explode. After all, the world will go to hell in a handbasket unless ONE LESS person stops misusing the term ONE LESS.....

[J]

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html

[stone]

If Alfred the Great was such an expert in the English language, is it acceptable to spell counselors as “counsillors”? Much of his scholarly work was translating Latin into Anglo-Saxon, much of which is not in common English usage today.