Just to prove how crotchety I am, here's another grammar-and-usage pet peeve: the way many people, including radio journalists, confuse "amount" and "number." Do any of the following make you shudder?
A. "There was a good amount of people at the wedding."
B. "I've never seen such a large number of ducks on that pond before."
C. "The amount of natural disasters happening around the world is really frightening."
I hope you selected (A) and (C). "Amount" refers to continuous quantities, like water or oil or money or happiness. For discontinuous, countable quantities, use "number." For example, you can eat a large amount of cake but a large number of cupcakes. You only need a small amount of shoe polish to polish a small number of shoes.
1 comment:
No, Penny, you're not being crotchety. You're advocating for sound grammar use in our media.
Here's another pair of words whose useage gets to me:
Did the Shuttle astronauts bring the AMS particle detector to the International Space Station on their current mission - or did they take it to the ISS? (It's not fair to say here they delivered it.)
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