Hacker News Reader

Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking about this, and I'm not sure what the rule is.

On the one hand you have 'Meccano', 'Playmobile' and similar, when referring to collections of brand items.

But on the other hand, you would refer to a single brand car park as 'Toyotas' or a collection of single brand laptops as 'Lenovos' without anyone batting an eye.

I'm with you - 'legos' sounds stupid to me - but really I need someone more formally trained in grammar for this one :)

View on HN

It comes down to whether the stuff is perceived as lots of little indistinguishable bits, or a few big chunks. The former category (mass or non-count nouns) includes water, grain (in the sense of a quantity of grain, not lots of kinds of grains), sand, snow, etc. They are not inflected for the plural and do not take numbers - we say "three grains of sand" not "three sands". It's plausible for Lego to work the same way - so "ten pieces of lego", not "ten legos".

Perhaps in these oft-cited days of lego sets that are more like a few big pieces than lots of little pieces, people will start to think differently.

"three sands" sounds like something Clarkson would say ... I think, his image immediately flashed in my mind when reading that.

Exactly. In English "Lego" is a mass noun, like water and sand. We say "a piece of lego" or "a lego piece" to identify a single brick.

I guess in American they don't treat it as a mass noun, and maybe they say "a lego" instead of "a piece of lego".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com