When Grammar Demons and Bike Demons Collide
The S.F. Bike Coalition knows its slogan, “One Less Car,” isn’t the goodest English
By Joe Eskenazi
“Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?” — George W. Bush, Jan. 11, 2000.
George W. Bush made the above remark (and a million others of equal cringe-worthiness) and yet, he still won the presidency.
Perhaps there has never been a clearer message presented to those of us who hold the English language dear: We don’t matter all that much.
And yet, like our forebears Sisyphus and Don Quixote, we carry on. We continue to annoy our friends who write to us about “loosing” their keys or “bussing” to work. And, regardless of our political affiliations, many of us wince whenever a San Francisco Bicycle Coalition member pedals (not peddles) past with the organization’s logo emblazoned on his or her shirt: “One Less Car.”
As you’ll clearly find on page 87 of your 1982 edition of Robert W. Bly and Gary Blake’s “Technical Writing: Structure, Standards, and Style,” fewer is used when units or individuals can be counted (“fewer containers”) while less is used with quantities of mass, bulk or volume (“less weight”).
In a fit of pique, I decided to call the bicycle coalition and inform them of their contravening of the rules of grammar. But I was surprised...
with the answer I received – they already know.
“Yeah, it’s not grammatical. For years that’s been known and people have been griping about it,” admits Andy Thornley, the group’s program director.
“We did try ‘One Car Fewer’ and that never really caught on. We also tried ‘One More Bike,’ but that doesn’t have the same punch. [A colleague] was saying we could do ‘470,000 Cars Minus One’ – if there’s room on the sticker.”
In fact, Thornley notes, he’s been on the lookout for some new slogans. Here’s some the coalition’s membership recently suggested at their Winterfest get-together:
• Great Minds Think A-Bike
• My Faster-Pass (“We don’t want to replace Muni, this is just a more reliable, cheaper alternative. It’d be a friendly coalition,” says Thornley, who admits his salary isn’t quite on par with Muni Chief Nathaniel Ford’s).
• Biker? I Hardly Know Her!
• Fixie-Shmixie (I didn’t get this one, so Thornley reminded me about my sometime SF Weekly colleague, Ephraim the Track Bike).
When I suggested “Bikers Do It in 18 Speeds,” Thornley laughed, but reminded me that the coalition can’t alienate the fixie crowd. Obviously Ephraim has more pull than I thought.
Got any good ideas? Send them to Thornley here.
While Thornley has been hearing about how “One Less Car” is poor English for a decade, he still has a soft spot for the slogan. The coalition prints shirts and stickers in Spanish (“Un coche menos,” which is grammatically correct) and Cantonese (“I can’t even guess at that. We’ll have to take it on faith.”).
“It’s really a very catch slogan,” he says. “It gets people talking – and gets people from alt-weekly papers calling me.”
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