more chad

[Dennis R. Preston]

Oh come on Arnold. Lighten up! Spose you were a sociolinguist and had lots
more important errors to correct.

dInIs (with nevertheless some sympathy for those who have to keep on
telling folk that the Eskimo language [sic] does not have a big gob of
words for snow)

>i was dismayed to see william safire repeating the confusion
>between mass nouns and plural nouns in his On Language column
>today.  granted, he was quoting someone else ("Peter Graham,
>now university librarian at Syracuse"), but that person is
>no linguist, and safire should have known better than to
>relay the claim that "the noun was then construed as plural,
>on the analogy of _chaff_".
>
>CHAFF is a (singular) mass noun: The chaff is all over the
>floor.  *The chaff are all over the floor.  as CHAD was/is
>for many people.
>
>arnold (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu), wearying of correcting
>  this confusion between meaning and form


Dennis R. Preston
Department of Linguistics and Languages
Michigan State University
East Lansing MI 48824-1027 USA
preston at pilot.msu.edu
Office: (517)353-0740
Fax: (517)432-2736