Adding the word 'Comment/s' to the comments bubble

I have started showing my site to a few users and one thing that has come out is a number of people don’t understand the comments bubble i.e. they don’t realise it is the number of comments or that they can click it etc. (I know, but users are always right, right :))

So I would like to change the look of the comments bubble to simply remove the actual bubble and add the word ‘comment/s’, so my comments would simply end up as ‘1 Comment’, ’10 Comments’ etc. (still maintaining the hyperlink obviously)

Any ideas of how I can achieve this? (I’m assuming it needs some PHP, particularly as it will need to handle showing the word ‘comment’ when there is only 1 comment but the word ‘comments’ when there is more than 1)