Beside the Irish shelves in my local supermarket there are no less than two others of produce surely intended to be sold in the US.

A few of these things I’ve read about, Hershey bars (chocolate,) Jello (jelly.* – At £1.50 a packet no less. One of the packets was chocolate flavoured; how do you get chocolate flavoured jelly? The picture on the packet showed the stuff was opaque. Weird.) Lifesavers(??) Hominy grits. The rest is more or less a mystery apart from what were obviously cereals.

I suppose this has turned up here because the supermarket concerned has just abandoned its attempts to make inroads into the US market.

Here are two close-ups. Click either side to enlarge.

What on Earth is this stuff?

(*What Usians call jelly we call jam, I think. See my post on Jelly Jungle.)

Speaking of supermarkets, I am of course the sort of person who feels like taking a marker pen to amend those notices at the “quick” tills for those who have only a handful of purchases.

The signs ought of course to read, “Fewer Than X Items.” (Insert whatever number applies.)

Fewer, because “items” describes a plural quantity. For example; fewer accidents would be a boon.

If supermarkets had fewer notices with mistakes like this I would find myself with less to moan about.

“Less” ought only to be used with singular nouns (as in “more haste, less speed”) or in expressions like this post’s title, or my previous sentence.

This one is mainly for our transatlantic cousins – but I’ve noticed it creeping on to supermarket labels/notices here.

Regular means occurring at intervals. Even intervals.
It doesn’t mean “normal,” it doesn’t mean “less than jumbo sized.”
It means “every so often.”

How regularly do you think I might have to say this?