Re: Bug#582109: debian-policy: document triggers where appropriate
On 10-04-13 18:19, Don Armstrong wrote:
> On Wed, 10 Apr 2013, Simon McVittie wrote:
>> <hat class="native-en_GB-speaker">
>> I've mostly seen whitespace used as a "mass noun", like water or
>> sand: you can say "whitespace is ignored" or "a sequence of
>> whitespace", but not "a whitespace" or "whitespaces", in the same
>> way that it's correct to say "some sand", "a piece of sand" or "a
>> cubic metre of sand", but not "a sand" or "sands".
>
> Slight nitpick: you can (almost) always refer to collections of mass
> nouns in a plural form. So whitespaces and sands are perfectly
> reasonable to use, but then they refer to multiple separate
> whitespace-containing areas, or multiple separate sand-containing
> areas.
Ah, yes, but then you still wouldn't say "whitespaces" or "sands"
without further qualification; you'd say something along the lines of
"Kara ben Nemsi rode his horse through the sands of Egypt" -- i.e., "the
sands", rather than just "sands".
anyway, EOT for me now -- I'm not even a native English speaker.
--
Copyshops should do vouchers. So that next time some bureaucracy
requires you to mail a form in triplicate, you can mail it just once,
add a voucher, and save on postage.
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