[Ads-l] hypercorrect pluralization of attributives

[Jonathan Lighter]

The the crawl has now been corrected to "three-time Pulitzer...."

JL

On Sat, Sep 17, 2016 at 3:42 PM, Benjamin Barrett <mail.barretts at gmail.com>
wrote:

> > On 17 Sep 2016, at 12:28, Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM> wrote:
> >
> > On Sat, Sep 17, 2016 at 2:15 PM, Jonathan Lighter <
> wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> >> A CNN crawl - admittedly sometimes careless - identifies the late Edward
> >> Albee as a "three-times Pulitzer Prize winner."
> >>
> >
> > Combine that with strings like , "_An_ average (HTF can there be more
> than
> > one _average_?!) little person is three _foot_ tall" and Briticisms like
> > "on holiday" and "go missing" and you have to conclude that, at the very
> > least, American English is not what it used to be, if it ever was.
>
> I think singular nouns for height are so common as to be safely idiomatic.
>
> She’s five feet eight
> She’s five foot eight
>
> The latter sounds better to my ear, perhaps because the number calculator
> in the brain is treating this like a “five-mile walk". But
>
> She’s five feet eight inches tall
> * She’s five foot eight inch tall
>
> Benjamin Barrett
> Formerly of Seattle, WA
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>



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------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org