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Grammar Girl here. I'm Inyane Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language.
Today, we're going to talk about the different ways you can count bacon, and then we'll look at what's interesting about the Martha's Vineyard accent.
Grammar Girl listener Kyle sent me this adorably meaty question.
He writes, This morning, my three -year -old told me he wanted a million bacons, which led to a discussion with my six -year -old about bites of bacon versus pieces of bacon.
It led me down a rabbit hole of seeing if bacon can be pluralized, and I'm finding mixed results.
Can you please weigh in on whether or not it's possible to have a million bacons?
Well, first of all, shout out to Kyle's Kids for bringing some sizzling linguistic curiosity to the breakfast table.
A million bacons might not be standard English, but it is a delightful phrase, not to mention a tantalizing visual for bacon lovers to imagine.
It also raises a question.
Can bacon be plural?
Well, to answer that, we need to get a little nerdy and dig into the difference between countable and uncountable nouns.
Let's start with the basics.
Countable nouns are nouns you can add a number in front of, or that work with words like many, few, several, or a couple of.
Let's look at bacon's favorite companion, eggs.
You can say, he ate an egg with his breakfast. In that case, egg is singular.
He ate one egg. Or you can say, I'd like two eggs and toast, because eggs can be made plural by adding an S.
It's a countable noun.
Now compare that to butter.
You wouldn't say, I'll have two butters.
You'd say some butter, a bit of butter, or maybe a pat of butter.
That makes butter an an uncountable noun, something we talk about in terms of quantity or portion, not individual units.
And this is where English loves to play tricks on us.
Some uncountable nouns feel like they should be countable, but they're not.
For example, you don't say, she gave me good advices.
You say, she gave me good advice.
You don't have three homeworks to turn in.
You have three homework assignments.
You don't buy a furniture or many furnitures.
You buy a piece of furniture or some new furniture.
These nouns—advice, homework, furniture—are part of a special group called uncountable nouns or sometimes mass nouns.
A mass noun is just a noun that refers to something you can't easily count as separate units.
You treat it as a whole, like a pile of laundry, a bowl of rice, or a gob of peanut butter.
And that brings us to our breakfast superstar, bacon.
Grammatically speaking, bacon is a mass noun.
That means you're not supposed to say two bacons or many bacons.
Instead, you'd say some bacon, a lot of bacon.
Or if you want to be really specific, a slice of bacon, a strip of bacon.
Or if you're feeling especially British, a rusher of bacon.
So let's get back to that three -year -old dream of a million bacons.
Is it grammatically correct?
Not by the book. But is it charming, playful, and understandable?
Absolutely. What's happening here is something linguists call reanalysis.
Your brain tries to make sense of language based on patterns it already knows.
Kids learn early on that if one thing is good, a million of them must be amazing.
And we can say a million Legos or a million cookies, so why not a million bacons?
This kind of pluralizing happens all the time in casual or humorous speech. Think of people saying things like, can I get two coffees to go?
I brought three cheeses to the party.
Are those technically correct?
Not always, but in context we get the meaning.
We're talking about cups of coffee or types of cheese, and in Kyle's kiddo's case, probably strips of bacon.
There are some uncountable nouns that can be pluralized, but doing so usually shifts the meaning.
Think of the word wine, w -i -n -e.
You wouldn't say, squiggly had many wines with his lunch. Well, you could, but we might need to stage an intervention.
That's because wine is an uncountable noun.
You don't usually count individual wines the way you'd count, say, muffins or eggs.
But in a different context, pluralizing it makes sense.
Aardvark appreciates French wines.
In that case, wines refers to different types of wine—merlot, syrah, chardonnay, and so on.
Water works the same way.
You wouldn't say, please bring waters for everyone at the table, unless you were intentionally being silly.
But in a poetic or geographic sense, waters is perfectly fine.
This is where the Columbia River meets the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
Here, waters refers to a specific body or region, not a countable unit, but a vast named expanse.
Cheese is another uncountable noun.
You don't normally say three cheeses when you're counting how much you have in your fridge.
You'd say some cheese or a block of cheese or maybe a slice.
But at a fancy party or your favorite grocery store's sample counter, you might hear someone rave about a selection of fine cheeses.
In that context, cheeses refers to different varieties—gouda, manchego, brie—not the number of slices on your plate.
So even though cheese is uncountable, its plural form is fair game when you're talking about types.
Sticking with food examples, you usually don't say three breads.
Bread is uncountable.
But you can count slices of bread or loaves of bread.
So instead of I bought three breads, you'd say I bought three loaves of bread.
That switch from an uncountable noun to a countable noun is how we get around the grammar. You're not counting the stuff itself, you're counting the portion, package, or type.
So with countable nouns, the trick is often to pair them with a unit of measurement, a glass of milk, a slice of bread, a wedge of cheese, a pat of butter, a bottle of olive oil.
And since we're talking about countable versus uncountable, we'd be remiss not to take a quick detour through the classic fewer versus less debate.
Here's the gist. If the noun is countable, use fewer, if it's uncountable, use less.
So you'd say fewer cookies because you can count cookies, but less sugar because you can't count sugar, at least not without a microscope.
And for the whole big story on less versus fewer and all the exceptions, check out episode 937.
We covered it about a year ago.
So to circle back to Kyle's question, can you have a million bacons?
Well, Well, if you're speaking by the book grammar, no, bacon doesn't pluralize that way.
You'd say a million slices of bacon or a mountain of bacon if you're feeling poetic.
But language isn't always about being correct.
Sometimes it's about being expressive or playful.
A million bacons might not pass an English teacher's red pen test, but we still know what Kyle's kiddo meant.
Give me all that delicious bacon.
So go ahead, enjoy your bacon however you count it.
Just maybe don't ask for a million bacons at a fancy brunch. Unless, of course, you're three years old, in which case, carry on, young linguist. That segment was written by Karen Lundy, a career writer and editor.
In the late 90s, as a young mom with two kids and a dog, she founded one of the internet's first writing workshop communities.
These days, she facilitates expressive writing workshops both online and off.
Find her at chanterellestorystudio .com.
substance use disorder and addiction is so isolating and so as a black woman in recovery hope must be loud it grows louder when you ask for help and you're vulnerable it is the thread that lets you know that no matter what happens you will be okay when we learn the power of hope Hope recovery is possible.
Find out how at startwithhope .com.
Brought to you by the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, Shatterproof, and the Ad Council.
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This next segment is by Valerie Friedland.
When most people meet a linguist, they wonder how many languages they speak.
While one sense of the term linguist is someone proficient in a multitude of languages, most people who study linguistics are instead focused on the cognitive and psychological architecture that underlies all languages, rather than being linguistic savants.
Linguists, in the quest to understand how and in what ways languages differ, examine things like why some languages, for example Inuktitut, have a legion of word endings, while others, like Chinese, have none.
Such questions are crucial to understanding the larger one of what our internal wiring for language is like and how it gave birth to so many distinct types over time.
But as the field of language research began to take hold as a scientific field of inquiry, it was only a matter of time until it became obvious that to understand language, one had to look at how it was embedded not just in our brains, but also in our societies.
For instance, why do younger speakers and older speakers say things so differently?
How could American and Australian English come from the same source dialects, but yet turn out bros, gals, mates, and sheilas that sound nothing alike?
And a question very relevant to modern discussions sessions of gender and race discrimination is how is it that we make assumptions about things like someone's sex or ethnicity just from hearing their voice?
Answering such questions requires a better understanding of how language gives us clues to the identity of the speakers who use it.
Previous accounts of language focused on reconstructing earlier forms of language, assuming that all changes could be accounted for by regular linguistic principles.
However, while over time changes might appear orderly and structured, living speakers use variable forms at different times and places in what often appeared as a chaotic or random fashion.
Explaining real speakers' everyday language use was a very different matter than looking at patterns of language development over time.
But three linguists working at Columbia in New York in the 1960s, Oriel Weinreich, William LeBove, and Marvin Herzog saw promise in looking more deeply at how social motivations interact with linguistic ones.
They suggested that language change grew out of not just language contact, such as that between French and English after the Norman Conquest, or natural processes such as changing stress patterns leading to the loss of word -final endings, but as a result of how these factors are influenced by the social structures, groups, and socio -historical events within which they're embedded.
As an example, Bill LeBeauve, one of the study's authors and the founder of the field of sociolinguistics, pointed to his findings in 1961 research on the small island of Martha's Vineyard off the northeast coast of the the U .S., where some very distinctive vowel variants could be heard. Martha's Vineyard had long been built on an economy of farming and fishing, but starting in the 50s and 60s, the island became an increasingly popular vacation destination for wealthy tourists.
As tourism began to take over their local economy, this influx from mainlanders was viewed, particularly particularly by those who had made their living as fishmongers, as an incursion and a threat to their traditional way of life.
Leboeuf interviewed many of the original families on the island, finding that the fishermen who lived up island, where more rural and traditional lifestyles still dominated, tended to use an older form of a vowel sound in words like sound or about, so that they were pronounced more like sea -and or aboot.
This was opposite the pattern on on the mainland and among the youngest speakers who planned to move off the island, where the more typical modern pronunciation had become the norm.
Middle -aged speakers who lived on the island, especially those who shared the view that the tourists were impacting their traditional livelihood and lifestyle, had also started to adopt this unique vowel pronunciation as a marker of what it means to be a true islander.
In short, by using older, more traditional vowels, these speakers showed verbal resistance to the incursion of outsiders and the loss of traditional occupations and values.
Use of this local norm aligned with speakers' attitudes toward the social and economic shifts taking place in their community.
What this study showed is that language contact, physiology, theology, and historical developments alone could not explain why speech on Martha's Vineyard had developed as it had.
Though the seeds for the signature pronunciations in words like toyd for tide and hus for house might have been planted by earlier settlers, the resurgence of these forms, particularly only among one specific set of speakers, was deeply engaged with the lifestyles of those on the island and the threat they perceived from outside forces.
Only by understanding language in its social context can the sound changes on the island be understood.
This study proved foundational to the field of modern sociolinguistics and to illuminating how deeply language change is tied to social triggers.
While it's perhaps not surprising that catastrophic catastrophic events like colonization, wars, and resettlement might change the course of language, sociolinguistic studies, such as that in Martha's Vineyard, illustrate that much more subtle differences—things like what we do for a living or our ethnic background—can be equally impactful on shaping our linguistic choices and influencing how others perceive us.
And in fact, much sociolinguistic work has even further proved that social meaning is a crucial part of what drives is not just what we say, but importantly, the way we say it.
That segment was written by Valerie Friedland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of Like Literally Dude, Arguing for the Good in Bad English.
You can find her at ValerieFriedland .com.
Finally, I have a familect from Michelle.
Hi, Mignon. My name is Michelle Johnson, and I have a family story for you.
When I was growing up, I used to use the word mermaid to describe any type of seasickness or carsickness.
It started because my cousin's mother's side of the family is Korean, and there is a word, something like mermaid.
And as a kid, I thought it was an English word, and called it mermaid.
I thought it was a good word to describe the feeling founded right and later realized no one knew what I was talking about.
Same story with tudgy.
Pig in Korean is something like tajay.
So tudgy is someone who gorges himself in food and also in other words that no one else understood.
But my family loves it, still use it once in a day, so that's my familect story.
I love the show. Keep doing what you do.
Thanks, Michelle. And how fun.
Those both do sound like they would mean the things you use them to mean.
Thanks for the call.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a word or phrase that you only use with your friends or family, leave a message on the voicemail line at 833 -214 -GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp.
Be sure to call from a nice quiet place.
And if you want that number or link later, you can always find them in the show notes.
Grammar Girl is a quick and dirty tips podcast, and we have lots of other shows.
Tomorrow, the nutrition diva will have a show about protein powders versus whole foods.
So check that out. Thanks to Morgan Christensen in advertising, Dan Feyerabend in audio, Nat Hoops in marketing, and Holly Hutchings, director of podcasts, who is working with a death doula on a personal podcast project.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl and author of the tip of a day book, The Grammar Daily.
That's all. Thanks for listening.
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