The Number You Have Reached is Not in Service

Back to Bryson's At Home. In describing what he calls "one of the grandest houses ever built in England, Castle Howard in Yorkshire," our genial author says of the imposing edifice, and it's eccentric architect, Sir John Vanbrugh:

A Vanbrugh structure is always like no other, but Castle Howard is, as it were, unusually unusual. It had a large number of formal rooms--thirteen on one floor--but few bedrooms: nothing like the amount that would normally be expected.

 As mentioned before, the word to use when dealing with discrete, countable units (such as rooms) is not amount but number--a particularly noteworthy gaffe here because Bryson uses number correctly earlier in the same sentence. Amount and number, in this way, are close cousins to less and fewer, although, as we discussed recently, the rules governing the distinctions between those two are not quite so cleanly defined.

This also happens to be one of the first grammatical niceties I had ingrained in my neurotic mind as a youth. I was about 10 years old, and showing my father a homework assignment--an essay (I can't remember what it was about, but I remember being proud of it) that contained the phrase "the amount of people who..." My old man gave me a brisk on-the-spot tutorial that set me straight on my error. I remember being impressed that he, as a still-fairly-recent German immigrant, had mastered the English language to such a degree. I also remember being pissed that his nit-picky correction was the only thing he had to say about my masterwork. Were I not of such sound character, such an incident could well have set me on a course to become the sort of person who obsessively nitpicks other peoples' writing.

Drink Up, Kids, or You Won't Amount to Anything

According to a notice from my daughter's school, "February is Healthy Kids Month!" The rest of the year, the tykes are free to be morbidly obese, disease-ridden alcoholic chain-smokers, but for the next 28 days...well, shape up, kiddies.

In keeping with the spirit of the occasion, every child in the school will be receiving a monogrammed stainless steel water bottle (or "Stainless Steel Water Bottle," as the caps-happy author of the message would have it) as a means of encouraging the regular consumption of fluids. In my day, schools were outfitted with hallway water fountains, which gave you an excuse to leave the class by saying you were thirsty, and afforded you the opportunity to, with the deft application of a thumb, spray passing girls with a jet of H2O. Education just ain't what it used to be.

In any case, we parents are advised that:

There will be a small amount of water bottles set aside, in case you would like to purchase an extra one.

 The problem here is with the word amount. Any time you're dealing with discrete individual units, the word to use is number. Amount is for those nouns that can't be counted. As in: "With the amount of water these kids will be drinking, we can expect to see an increase in the number of bathroom visits."