Beyond the grammatical looking glass

In my attempt to double-check the appropriate plural of “Starbucks,” I discovered the grammatical concept: “mass noun“…

[Mass nouns] cannot be directly modified by a numeral without specifying a unit of measurement, and that they cannot combine with an indefinite article.

In learning about mass nouns, I came across “cumulative reference“…

If one collection of cutlery is combined with another, we still have “cutlery.” Similarly, if water is added to water, we still have “water.” But if a chair is added to another, we don’t have “a chair,” but rather two chairs. Thus the nouns “cutlery” and “water” have cumulative reference, while the expression “a chair” does not.

and “telicity“…

One common way to gauge whether an English verb phrase is telic is to see whether such a phrase as in an hour, in the sense of “within an hour”, (known as a time-frame adverbial) can be applied to it.

It’s a good thing I didn’t have Wikipedia in college when I used to really geek out on logic, or I would have evolved into a big semantics dork, too.

From what I can tell, there’s a lot of people on the internet wondering what the plural of Starbucks is, but no one has definitively answered the question. I’m sure employees have a convention, but I haven’t seen it. I’d suggest that it’s a defective headless noun, like Red Sox, and its plural would just be “Starbucks.”

Geeky accounting pet peeve

I hear people say “amortize” all the time when what they mean is “depreciate”. Amortize sounds fancy, but it’s only for intangible assets.

I guess I’ve got it pretty good when something so trivial can find room in my day to bug me :-)

I got an email response from John Gruber!

I read DaringFireball every day, as every good, God-fearing  user should. I came across a post yesterday, which prompted me to email the author, John Gruber, the following note:

You used the phrase “to not just forbid the use of the APIs” in your post about Amazon today.

Hardly seems like you. I’ve always appreciated your attention to grammatical detail.

Before you decide I’m a total d-bag, note that he’s a real stickler for language, and invites corrections.

This morning, to my surprise, I received this thoughtful, personal email from him:

Good catch, and I truly appreciate grammar and spelling error reports from readers. However, in this case, it was not an error.

I firmly believe that there is nothing wrong with split infinitives. The “rule” against them originated in the late 1800’s, apparently from rule-happy grammar teachers versed in Latin. There was no such rule against them before that.

Take the famous line from Star Trek:

To boldly go where no one has gone before.

Move “boldly” before or after the unsplit “to go” and the phrase loses all of its vigor.

-J.G.

For reference as to how happy this made me, I also had an email in my inbox from David Ortiz’s agent, and I opened Gruber’s first.

Perhaps split infinitive’s grate on me because I studied a bunch of Latin, or perhaps it’s because I have so many insecurities about my own command of English, and this is one of the few rules I can consistently obey. Either way, I’ll continue to pass on split infinitives, but I can now respect those who consciously employ them.

A quick scan of Wikipedia suggests this issue is far more complex than I’d originally appreciated.

By the way, like Gruber, I also invite any spelling or grammar corrections readers can suggest.

Vocab experiment over

I can’t deal with the way the words look on my site out of context. It must be even more annoying for a reader.

I’d love something that would aggregate all my words throughout a week and post once, with definitions, but, until I learn Yahoo Pipes, that’s not gonna happen.