Bucky wrote:'forest' is not a collective noun, by anyone's definition

phatj wrote:I think you can treat "data" as either a plural or a mass noun.

JUburton wrote:

phatj wrote:I think you can treat "data" as either a plural or a mass noun.

The amount of data is indeterminate and you say 'data is'.

No one says 'datum' and data are sounds incredibly pretentious.

mozartpc27 wrote:--snip--

"It" is something of an exception, in that its nominative and accusative (i.e., objective) forms are the same (that is, "it"), but actually, that has precedence in older languages: for example, in Latin, neuter nouns - because Latin has masculine, feminine, and neuter - often exhibit no difference between the nominative and accusative forms. The word for war in Latin is neuter - "bellum" - and that is its form in both the nominative and the accusative. However, in the possessive, the word is "belli." And, in English, "it" is the form of the singular neuter personal pronoun in the nominative and accusative cases, but "its" is its form in the possessive case - there is that "s" again.

So, the "-s" we see indicative of possessives in English, whether in our pronouns - his, hers, its, ours, yours, theirs - or added to our nouns - farmer's, child's, dog's - is kind of like the appendix of the English language, an old remnant from a dead earlier form of the language.

This leads to the obvious question: why the apostrophe? it's a typographical quirk, and its origins are, from what I've ever read, somewhat obscure. You'll occasionally hear people say that the apostrophe is there to indicate the removal of the word "his" from a possessive phrase: that, in days gone by, people would say "the farmer his book," but that this got shortened to "the farmer's book," and although no one even remembers the missing 'his' anymore, the apostrophe is still there as some kind of a lonely memorial to its former presence.

This is incorrect.

In fact, there is some evidence that writers - even writers from several hundred years ago - started retro-expanding phrases like "the farmer's book" INTO "the farmer his book," because they didn't know why there was an added "s" to a noun when you were indicating possession and thought that this would somehow explain it and be more formal. Indeed, the practice of using an apostrophe when spelling a possessive may have arisen from that confusion/practice. But rest assured, that "s" - both in "farmer's" and in "its" - is the same "s," a last remaining inflection in our modern language that has mostly done away with that system.

joe table wrote:is it technically correct?

joe table wrote:So in writing quick replies most people at my work respond "Thank you, *name*" instead of "Thank you *name*". It annoys me but is it technically correct?

WheelsFellOff wrote:My thanks to you, Joe, for that thing you did.

Thanks, Joe, for doing that.

Thanks, Joe.