A more complete information

[James Smith]

Maybe it's just a typo.


--- Damien Hall <halldj at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU> wrote:
> What do people on this list think about whether
> *information* is countable?  I
> got the following in a University-wide e-mail
> recently.
>
> ============
>
> Join your fellow students for a more complete
> information about what is
> already underway and ways for students to become
> involved.  Oh, and there
> will be pizza, too.
>
> ============
>
> My own feeling is that *information* is not
> countable in the normally-used
> sense.  *OED* lists several uses where it is
> countable, but they are all either
> 'Obs.' or legal usage;  *Merriam-Webster* doesn't
> list it as countable at all.
> Google and Google Groups hits for "an information"
> are almost all "an
> information x", of course, where *information* is
> used attributively and *x* is
> *superhighway*, *specialist* or something.  Of the
> five hits in the top hundred
> of each search where *information* is genuinely
> countable, four are probably
> from non-native speakers of English and one is in a
> legal sense.
>
> I know that *information* is countable in French;
> I'm reliably informed that it
> isn't in Spanish.  I'm tempted to ascribe these
> countable uses of the word in
> English to non-native error (the University message
> above wasn't signed, so I
> can't tell who wrote it), but I wonder whether
> people here have come across the
> use in native English.
>
> Damien Hall
> University of Pennsylvania


=====
James D. SMITH                 |If history teaches anything
South SLC, UT                  |it is that we will be sued
jsmithjamessmith at yahoo.com     |whether we act quickly and decisively
                               |or slowly and cautiously.




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