I agree with your assessment of his post, that metric was off, at least in my experience.
I just reread The Hobbit a couple months ago, but after thinking about it for a while, I only came up with 12 dwarves. I’d forgotten Ori.
The seven Disney Dwarfs are a piece of cake. I’ve been able to rattle those off since I was a kid.
As for the plurals, in all cases I voted that they “should be” exactly what they are.
@markn_1 did a nice job on the dwarfs/dwarves explanation.
I’d always assumed that the Maple Leafs were so named because they represented the national symbol of the Maple Leaf and not a literal leaf, which changed the pluralization.
But there seems to be some disagreement on the origin of the name. Some contend the team was named for the WWI “Maple Leaf” regiment, who were familiarly known as “Maple Leafs.” Others claim that story is bogus and that it’s “Leafs” simply because a team name is a proper noun, and proper nouns don’t have irregular plurals.
Whatever, it is what it is and I accept it as such.
But then you first need to estimate the area of the space. Which I have no idea of, either.
But the “Leafs” part is part of the name, I presume? The team isn’t named “Maple Leaf”, is it? and if not, a proper noun, in particular, a name, can be spelled however the ones whose name it is want to spell it. (I’m one of the people who voted “Who?”; not because I’ve never heard the name, but because I don’t know anything more about them than the name, and that, presumably, they’re a Canadian professional team of some sport.)
Toronto Maple Leafs, one of the “Original Six” teams in the NHL - National Hockey League, before any of the expansions (the first one occurring in 1967) happened.
Steven Pinker explained this as a manifestation of the English grammar rule that headless compound nouns do not take irregular plurals. A headless compound noun is one that refers to an object that cannot be referred to by the last noun alone. For example, a mailman can also be referred to as a man, so it is not headless. But a Walkman cannot be referred to as a man, so it is headless and its plural is not Walkmen (for most people; I did a poll about it a couple of years ago). Likewise, when I talk about all the maple leaves in my yard, each one is not only a maple leaf but is also a leaf, so I can use the irregular plural. But when I talk about Toronto Maple Leafs, each one is a Maple Leaf but is not a leaf, so I use the regular plural.
Thanks. I would have guessed hockey, but I wasn’t sure.
And yes, “Leafs” does look like it’s part of a proper name; which again is properly spelled however the one(s) called by that name choose to spell it. Why they chose that version, I don’t know; but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and presume it wasn’t because nobody involved with the creation of the name knew how to spell “leaves”.
Huh. That makes sense; I didn’t know it was a grammar rule. Maybe the people who chose the name did know that.
Isn’t the difference between “fewer” and “less” something technical about whether it refers to separable things (“fewer things on my list today!”) or overall quantities that don’t divide in that fashion (“less coffee in my cup this morning”)?
Delving back into the depths of time:
Does this mean a gap because there’s a missing tooth, or a diastema netween two teeth?
No missing teeth, just an unusually wide space between teeth that were always adjacent.
If it was the Toronto Maple Leaves then @Leaffan would have to change his name.
Opposite of more depends on the context.
Fewer is used for countable objects, less is used for non-countable objects, more is used for both, so:
The opposite of more apples is fewer apples
The opposite of more water is less water.
That happened to me at Mardi Gras in New Orleans in the late 80s. I honestly thought I might get crushed to death. Terrifying experience. Fortunately, of short duration.
I’ll have to go back and change my crowd size answer. I mistakenly thought there’d only been 200K at Woodstock 2, but there were actually more than 350K.
Same for me. In fact, now? My eyes glaze over any time it (or any other Tolkien stuff) is mentioned.
Correct. Less coffee in my cup, fewer spoons of sugar. But that is slip sliding away.
Look at his avatar. He’s not exactly hiding it.
Seems like he’s been away for awhile.
Ah.
I can’t usually read/recognize pictures in avatars in the size in which they show next to posts, so I don’t usually pay them much attention. But going to the profile, yes, in that size Leaffan’s is obvious. (Yours, I still can’t figure out.)
It’s a Light Observation Helicopter (LOH) pronounced “loach.”
Right.
It’s kind of like asking: What’s the opposite of “light”? Is it “dark” or “heavy”?
Ah. Thanks for info.
I’m slightly torn on the Friday Feb. 28 purchasing.
One the one hand, it’s the day I normally do our weekly grocery shopping, and I was planning on the usual groceries, some additional alcohol (since for the second consecutive week the layoffs at my wife’s work have been postponed with no info [ 33% of staff ] ), and the cat fud.
On the other hand, I could do it all on Saturday, with minimal fuss, it’s not like I’d run OUT of anything. But it’s it’s almost always more crowded all the places I was planning on going.
Still, I’m about 90% certain I’ll take the minor fuss and bother involved and wait a day.