amount.” Thus “I have less than two hundred dollars” or “I weigh less than two hundred pounds” or “a country that’s gone to hell in less than five months,” because it’s not really the individual months one’s interested in, merely the relative brevity of the decline. That said—and there’s always a “that said,” isn’t there—one does not say “one fewer,” both because it’s achingly unidiomatic and because it wrecks the title of the Bacharach-David classic “One Less Bell to Answer.”
