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. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/51659c55.2000...@debian.org