Bristle hair. Bristle fiber. You SHOULD beg my pardon after that nonsense!
corn silks?
That doesn’t follow the rules.
I’m holding a bristle in my hand right now. Would you take this bristle from me please? No modifier is needed. You can hold a bristle in your hand.
Athletes commonly refer to spending time reviewing “game film” in the “film room” in preparation for the upcoming big game. We’re talking people in their 20s and 30s who have probably never even seen an actual “film”. In the last 40+ years we’ve moved from film to reel to reel video tape, to Betamax, to VHS tapes, to DVD’s and to digital recordings.
The material isn’t bristle.
bris·tle
/ˈbrisəl/
noun
- a short stiff hair, typically one of those on an animal’s skin, a man’s face, or a plant.
Yes. That is a countable noun, not a material.
A text string, he said in the message thread.
That reminds me, I must get a new skin for my avatar
We call that ‘card’, or if it is rough and fibrous, ‘cardboard’. Cereal boxes are made of cardboard. Modellers and crafters use fine card, or sometimes use ‘plasticard’, which is card made from plastic.
Posted on a board
Please nitpick me!
Okay, there’s still a lot of confusion here. Ask these questions:
- Am I naming an object? As in, can I put the indefinite article “a/an” in front of the object’s name, and it makes sense?
- Is the object named after a material? As in, is there a material that’s an uncountable noun?
- Do the object and the material have exactly the same name? “A glass” and “glass” have exactly the same name. “A quilt” and “quilting material” do not.
- Is, or was, the object traditionally made from the material?
- Is the object sometimes made from another material?
- When the object is made from another material, does it retain the name?
If you can answer “yes” to all six question, you got it.
See my previous post, look at question 4.
same, plus question 2
Yippee!
The Master Speaks!
To paraphrase Seinfeld, master of my own dumb game.
Bristle is a material. That’s why there are bristle brushes, referring to either real bristles which are still made, or artificial bristles. An individual bristle is made from bristle or a substitute but still called a bristle, and it is made out of bristle. Your distinction is not a distinction.
You’re wrong that “bristle” is a material in the same way that “glass” is a material.
? ISTM that “bristle” refers both to individual bristles (the primary meaning of the word) and the substance that they’re composed of. Just as “bone” refers both to individual bones (primary meaning) and the substance that they’re composed of.
(“Hair” likewise can mean an individual hair or a material that objects can be manufactured from, as in “hair shirt” or “hair jewelry”.)
If you were willing to accept the expression “a steel corset bone” as meeting your criteria, I don’t see why you would reject “a nylon bristle”.
Because of the dictionary:
Show me a definition of “bristle” which includes the word “material,” and I’ll rethink.
Those goalposts are kind of wobbly, aren’t they? I mean, you provisionally accepted the concept of “a plastic straw” as meeting the criteria, although “straw” refers to specific pieces of a particular substance, rather than the undifferentiated material of that substance, just as much as “bristle” does.
I don’t really see why a substance needs to be completely amorphous rather than composed of distinct pieces in order to qualify as “a material” anyway. But even if we accept that it does, I don’t think you’re applying that criterion totally consistently.