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you Americans need to think about your "LEGOs" problem
by cottsak 3y ago
you Americans need to think about your "LEGOs" problem
- cgriswald 3y agoYou really don’t want to go down this road. I have no problem starting a movement to get Americans to call them “LEGO’s” and you won’t be able to even suggest it’s wrong because it’ll just be a contraction of “LEGO parts,” “LEGO bricks,” and “LEGO sets.” (But feel free to lambast us over punctuation and quotation marks.)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- emsixteen 3y agoThis comment made me twitch involuntarily.
- scoot 3y agoThat isn't how contractions in English work – you can't form a contraction from two nouns. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/contractions https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/con...
- atoav 3y agoHow long do you thing that they will turn the already-plural "data" into the hyper-plural "datas"? Or has this already happened, I am too afraid to check.
- andybak 3y agoDatases.
- thehappypm 3y agoNasty datases
- Lio 3y agoDatums? ...and lets not get into the "paninis" situation.
- schrodinger 3y agoEh, devils advocate: when a word becomes more of a loan word than just a usage of its proper origin, doesn’t it make sense to follow the new languages patterns? Different grammatical situation of course but similar in spirit is “latte.” It just means milk in Italian and so in Italy you’d always say cafe latte. But in the states everyone knows it as the coffee drink (Starbucks probably to blame). Same with salsa—just means sauce in Spanish—but it’s become an English word in the states at this point and taken a different meaning. Entree being another more egregious example…
- Lio 3y agoEntree really is a particularly egregious example because it's meaning is different in different English speaking countries.
- FabHK 3y agoI've seen (older) German texts where "Jesus" is declined as in Latin, eg "the apostles Jesu" (=of Jesus, genitive) or "We saw Jesum" (=accusative). Somewhat jarring. As you say - when do you stop?
- nwatson 3y agoData is a mass/uncountable noun now (like meat) rather than a countable noun (like coin/coins). Turning it countable involves a helper noun like data point / data points. "Datum?" Almost nobody uses that in the vernacular.
- EasyMark 3y agoImagine that, language and grammar change from country to country. We must alert the king! Light the fires of Gondor!
- JasonFruit 3y agoLEGOs makes sense; a LEGO is an indivisible entity, of which you can have a certain number. Calling the material simply LEGO makes it sound like an undifferentiated mass, like sludge, or cheese.