“Amount” For People

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Helen Lopez from El Centro, California.

Hi, Helen. How are you doing?

Fine, thanks. How are you?

All right. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

My question is about the two words and their usage, amount and number. It’s sort of a pet peeve of mine that I’ve wondered about for years. And I’ve always been of a mind that when you use the word amount, you’re talking about things that cannot be counted, things that are sort of fungible, like grains of sand or something like that. And when you use number as an adjective, that that’s for things that can be counted, like people or cows or things such as that.

So when people say it’s a large amount of people, it sounds wrong to me. And I’ve always wondered if I’m correct or incorrect.

May I just say how much I enjoy hearing the word fungible? Thank you for using that.

I went to law school. That’s why I used that.

I was going to ask if you were an accountant. It’s one of those words I’ve had to look up time and time and time again. It’s got a good sound in the mouth, too, right? Good mouthfeel. Good mouthfeel. Like a nice glass of wine.

So thank you for that, Helen. This is a really interesting one. And so your dispute is whether or not amount and number are exactly equal and could be treated the same when it comes to counting things or referring to things as a mass unit, right?

Correct. Well, things that are counted should be a number of things, and things that can’t should be an amount of stuff. And that is generally the accepted wisdom in most style and usage guides.

A number is usually for count nouns. We have a, there are a number of cars in the lot, right? Right, right. An amount is usually for mass. Number of people in the room. Amount is usually for mass nouns. There’s an unusual amount of sand in the drain pipe, right? So it’s something that can’t be counted. But notice my word usually. We have some exceptions.

If you get a bonus at work, your boss might say your bonus in the amount of $1,000 would be paid to you on Friday. Your boss wouldn’t say, and that’s $1,000, actually discrete dollars that are being counted up to the amount of $1,000. So it’s not really a mass at all. And we have a few other places where we typically do this, so there are some exceptions. But I’m going to basically say I’m agreeing with you. There’s no reason that a number and amount should be considered exactly equal.

Okay. Where I hear it a lot is, unfortunately, with the newscasters who talk about large amounts of people here and there, and it really bothers me. That sounds like very large people. If you break it down, if you really overanalyze it.

I can’t get behind that, but I can get my mind to where they are if we think about people as this large, undefined number. We’re not saying persons, right? People is a mass of persons. People is a, like I could have, you know, there are many people in the room. It could be three or it could be three million. You know, it’s hard. I can get behind that.

And I understand also as radio people, Martha and I totally get that sometimes you’re speaking off the cuff and it just can’t be helped. You say a solacism comes out and that’s just the way it is.

Yeah, I’m not buying it. You expect perfection from your radio hosts and your newscasters?

All right, we’ll work on that. We’ll do better. All right. Well, thank you very much. You’ve now cleared up something that’s been bugging me for about 30 years. So I will rest easier tonight.

Yeah. Hey, glad to help. Thanks, Helen. Really appreciate it. Stay cool there in El Centro, all right?

Thank you so much. All righty. Take care now. All right. Bye-bye.

The style guides are actually a little in a disagreement over this, like Fowler’s usage Guide and Brian Garner’s Modern American Usage. Kind of Garner takes the hard line, very much says a mount should never refer to people. Fowler says it often refers to people that’s just the way that it is. It’s a style thing, though. We should be clear on this one more than it’s a grammar thing. The grammar of English doesn’t much care either way because it doesn’t have feelings.

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