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It's very slightly annoying to me that people stopped properly abbreviating "mathematics" as "math's".
by tomjakubowski 8y ago
It's very slightly annoying to me that people stopped properly abbreviating "mathematics" as "math's".
- pretendscholar 8y agoHow does it make sense to tack on the last letter?
- ggm 8y agoBecause the plural of lego is lego, does not mean the plural of math is math..
- pretendscholar 8y agoThe word mathematics is singular not plural. People say mathematics is hard not mathematics are hard.
- ggggtez 8y agoThe linguistic way to say that is to note that mathematics is an "uncountable noun", just like "water". It's plural, just you can't have just "one mathematic".
- Angostura 8y agoIt's plural just in the way that "history" isn't.
- Varcht 8y agoAt least we all still put our pants on the same way...
- yesenadam 8y ago...over our fannies?! :O
- toufiqbarhamov 8y agoAh you’re taking me for a ride.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> The word mathematics is singular not plural. It was originally considered plural. That may even by why the transition from “mathematic” to “mathematics” happened in English.
- tanbog 8y agoI know plenty of people who say "Legos". But then I am from Australia.
- ggm 8y agoLeggos. I mean who can go past pasta sauce advertised by bad Muppets?
- ggm 8y agoDon't get me, or other queens-english speakers started on the american habit of twenty hundred one (notice no "and")
- dragonwriter 8y agoI've been in America for a few years short of five decades now and literally never heard “twenty hundred” (as a number; it is used in military timekeeping.) The closest pattern to that is consistently not used with numbers of hundreds evenly divisible by ten. (OTOH, it is often used with “and”; the rule of not using and between components within the whole number portion but only to separate the whole number from a fractional part is not consistently applied in that informal alternative to the more formal thousands-hundreds form.)
- ggm 8y agoOk. Ignoring twenty hundred, any hundred AND something had an AND in it. For some reason the septics dropped AND.
- onewhonknocks 8y agoI thought the 'and' was typically used to denote a decimal place. ex: $270.50 -> Two hundred seventy dollars and fifty cents
- ggm 8y agoTwo or more and is fine by me mate!
- chrismorgan 8y agoAn apostrophe has never been in common use in “maths”, and so “math’s” would be incorrect except for indicating possession (e.g. in the US I can imagine people might say “the math’s sound” where in Australia I’d say “the maths is sound”). Not all abbreviations get an apostrophe just because some letters were dropped. Very vague, weak citation: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=maths%2Cmath%27s%2Cmath&year_start=1800&corpus=18 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=maths%2Cmath%2...