Hacker News Reader

Comment by cottsak | Hacker News Reader

you Americans need to think about your "LEGOs" problem

You 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.)

That isn't how contractions in English work – you can't form a contraction from two nouns.

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/con...

Quite right, what's needed here is a portmanteau - Legarts

I prefer Legricks. Dammit kids, pick up your legricks, I darn near killed myself!

This comment made me twitch involuntarily.

How 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.

Data 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.

I have seen it used in more than one software project and I know IT/Software people (including myself) who use it.

Datases.

Nasty datases

Data /is/ plural. One datum, set of data.

Exactly my point

Datae

Datums?

...and lets not get into the "paninis" situation.

Eh, 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…

Entree really is a particularly egregious example because it's meaning is different in different English speaking countries.

I'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?

LEGOs 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.

Imagine that, language and grammar change from country to country. We must alert the king! Light the fires of Gondor!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com