Amount of vs. Number of Something

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Oh, hi, Martha. This is Beth. I’m calling from Crete, which is the southernmost island of Greece. Wow. Wow, Crete. Yasu.

Okay, my question is, because I’m kind of a stickler, having been an English teacher most of my adult life. And I keep hearing on supposedly sites that should know better using the word amount for something that I’ve always taught my kids should be a number of.

So you can’t say I didn’t think an amount of people. You should say a number of people, a number of apples, a number of dogs. But I hear it all the time on the BBC, on, you know, American news outlets. So I’m just wondering, is that something that has changed? Is that acceptable now?

So you might be watching BBC and they might say there’s a large amount of people protesting on the placa or something like that. Exactly. Exactly. And I did actually see, not to name names, but on NPR about 10 days ago, which is why I wrote to you. They were talking about something like, well, for $10, what’s the amount of eggs you can buy? Which wasn’t in speech. It was written down.

Okay, in speech, sometimes you’re going to make those, you know, you’re live on air or whatever. But this was written down, and I kind of went, whoa, amount of eggs, really? So is that accepted usage? Else I can stop, you know, getting bugged by it or yeah, you know, it’s funny because in these you live in a multilingual universe there, you know, being an England native English speaker but living in a Greek-speaking environment you probably are part of a multilingual world anyway since Greek is part of Europe and it’s a very cosmopolitan country anyway, right? We heavily visited by people from around the world who want to come and enjoy its food and its culture, you know, a deep history that’s there.

But it’s all about circumstances. So we have, on one side, we have these formal situations, the texts that you would write, say, for your classes, your professors and your teachers, or for the workplace where you’re writing reports and proposals and maybe something for your business partners. Those places are where you would probably want to adhere to these very strict rules. And then the strict rule in this case is the distinction that amount applies to substances that are considered as mass, and number applies to something that can be counted as individuals within a group.

But in everyday speech, we don’t need to make that distinction. And so that’s what we’re hearing. Now, the problem is that news often straddles those two universes. It straddles formal speech and informal speech because the speakers of news often are talking off the cuff. They’re not working from scripts necessarily. They’re paid to be the kind of people who can assess a situation without having to do a huge amount of prep. And so sometimes they’re just working from their own brains. And that means that they’re calling on those informal patterns.

Right. Well, that’s why I was asking, like, are we going to be, you know, more of a stickler for writing it down? In speech, I understand that, but I never hear a number of people being said anymore. It’s an amount of people. What I hear here, you know.

Yeah. You’ll see it in print. One thing to remember, Beth, is that spoken language is the original language. And written language is this highly structured kind of organized, stylized language that we have invented on top of spoken language. So the written language is this artificial construct. So, Beth, I hope that makes you feel a little better.

Yeah. Well, it means that I could just say, I could just relax about this. I don’t have to correct everything. Yeah. Yes, just relax and enjoy the sunshine and the beaches and the blue, blue waters.

Well, yes. Great conversation, though. Fantastic. You’re a delight and a treat. Okay. Thanks a lot. Have a great day. Bye.