[Ads-l] scattered shower (singular)?

Laurence Horn laurence.horn at YALE.EDU
Sun May 28 03:14:52 UTC 2017


And somehow “there’s a chance of a widely scattered shower” seems worse.  But I suppose if a single shower can be an occasional one (since nobody bats an eye at “chance of an occasional shower”—albeit maybe that’s hypallage raising its sneaky head again), it can be a scattered one too.

LH

> On May 27, 2017, at 3:00 PM, Barretts Mail <mail.barretts at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> 
> From https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scattered_shower <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/scattered_shower>
> 
> 	• (chiefly Britain) Any of a series of showers of rain, whose number, location and timing are impossible to predict
> 
> Sounds semantically odd to me, though.
> 
> Benjamin Barrett
> Formerly of Seattle, WA
> 
>> On 27 May 2017, at 11:54, James A. Landau <JJJRLandau at NETSCAPE.COM> wrote:
>> 
>> Heard on a weather forecast from WRTI-FM: "There is a chance of a scattered shower today".
>> 
>> - Jim Landau
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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