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Saturday, January 9, 2010

Customers should be counted, too!

I said yesterday that AMOUNT and NUMBER continue to be a problem. That remains true today. There is a good letter to the editor in The Birmingham News this morning about the cappuccino flap. Personally, I like frothy milk in my decaf skimmed milk cappuccino. At least I can pretend I'm sipping that great liquid through whipped cream!

Celia Mayhew, who works at Starbucks, defended the cappuccino, but in doing so, she made this statement:

I work at Starbucks, and there is no way to comprehend the insane amount of customers that complain about the frothy milk within a cappuccino.

Insane or not, those customers can be counted. They are not sugar or salt or laundry, as I pointed out yesterday. Therefore, the sentence should read as follows:

I work at Starbucks, and there is no way to comprehend the insane number of customers who complain about frothy milk within a cappuccino.

BONUS COMMENT: Notice that I also changed the word THAT to WHO in this sentence. This is not an absolute rule, but it is a good "rule of thumb." Whenever you refer to people (or a person), use WHO instead of THAT.

1 comment:

ccmayhew7 said...

Hello! This is Celia Mayhew. I will never excel at grammar, and I feared more errors than this in my post, but I am glad that you only found one or two. Thank you! I will remember this in the future and change my ways! Please don't critique this comment, I am sure that there is something wrong with it. Haha!