The owner of a Berlin, Maryland, produce stand wants to know: When a customer is buying four ears of corn, should they say I have four corn or I have four ears of corn? Corn is a mass noun that can also be counted as a plural, just as we might say I...
Calling from the Greek island of Crete, a retired English teacher named Beth asks about using of amount of instead of number of when it comes to such phrases as the amount of people or the amount of eggs. The traditional distinction is that amount...
Nikki in Northampton, Massachusetts, disagrees with her teenage daughter about the word beef, as in to have a beef, meaning “to have a problem with someone or something.” Nikki uses the word a before the word beef, but her daughter omits...
In just seconds, online text generators and chatbots can produce whole paragraphs of sophisticated prose. But what do advances in artificial intelligence mean for writers? What is lost and what’s gained when machine-writing replaces the work...
win n.— Note: This is a slang us of “win” as a mass noun. «Wow, I never knew the Smooth Criminal video was a tribute to Astaire! This is great, full of win.» —“Astaire/Jacko mashup video: Smooth Criminal” by...
