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A Point About Grammar
mwb1100:
I'm curious about one thing in the original post - what's the problem with "mass nouns"?
-mwb1100 (March 02, 2011, 05:28 PM)
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It's a matter of proper jargon and using the correct term. It would be like calling a hard drive a "stiff drive".
-Renegade (March 02, 2011, 05:42 PM)
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Not to say this necessarily means it's correct, but I recall "mass noun" being used back when I was in school, many many years ago. And a quick search on Google nets the term being used in linguistics research papers (where correct terminology would be important, I'd think). Could this be a situation where there might be more than on one correct name for a thing? Like "hard drive"/"hard disk" or dirigible/airship.
dirigible? What the hell made that word pop into my head?
Renegade:
This just seems bizarre...
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun[/url]w
I've read a LOT of books on grammar, and NEVER seen that. They have ALWAYS used "countable" to describe it.
Maybe it's an American English thing or is a newer term. Dunno.
On that topic though, one uncountable noun that has crept into being a countable noun that I find somewhat irritating is "beers". It's like "waters". It contracts "X bottles of beer" or "X glasses of beer" into "beers". It just seems like a sloppy bastardization to me.
Target:
the trouble with interpretising grammatical expression is that so much of it is contextual, and what is correct in one context is incorrect in another.
To use Stoic's example 7 chairs are countable or mass, whereas furniture is not. But if you were referring specifically to the chairs you wouldn't say furniture, even though it is potentially correct.
cranioscopical:
Either way I have heard the news folk screw it up.
-Stoic Joker (March 02, 2011, 05:52 PM)
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And just why is it <pause> that news folk feel <pause> the need to inject <pause> inappropriate pauses <pause> into almost every sentence spoken??? >:(
Renegade:
Either way I have heard the news folk screw it up.
-Stoic Joker (March 02, 2011, 05:52 PM)
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And just why is it <pause> that news folk feel <pause> the need to inject <pause> inappropriate pauses <pause> into almost every sentence spoken??? >:(
-cranioscopical (March 02, 2011, 07:04 PM)
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Their language buffers in their brains are too small, and they can't double buffer, so you get choppy playback. :P
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