Well, yeah. US English vs UK English (feel free to call it “rest of the world English” if you’d like). If we’re talking about other languages then, no. Many (maybe most?) other language pluralize “lego” according to the pluralization rules of that language. Like, for example, how “lego” becomes “legos” in US English, “lego” becomes “legok” in Hungarian. As for how the company wants their product referred to, it doesn’t matter. Non-US English speakers seem to prefer the sound of “Lego” for the plural. That’s fine. US English speakers think “Legos” sounds more natural, hence that being the plural here. Non-US English speakers seem to hear “Lego” as an uncountable mass noun, like, I dunno, “concrete.” I personally hear it as a countable noun more similar to “block” that should be pluralized as “blocks.”
Yeah, I couldn’t really care less what the Lego company wants me to call them. One piece is a Lego, multiple pieces are Legos. I’m not going to waste my breath calling them “Lego bricks.”
Hijack the hijack that I hate the hating this.
Lego still makeslots of sets of basic pieces.
And the Classic Space range started outwith plenty of specialized pieces, too.
They do. Hardly any stores seem to carry them, however. (And no, I am not going to The Lego Store. Not until I win the lottery, anyhow.)
Meh. IMO most of the hating on the current Lego sets is nostalgia-based. “It’s not like it was when WE were kids and therefore it’s bad.”
Kids love Legos. If they get a spaceship set with specialized parts, they build it. Then they take it apart. Then they use those specialized parts in other weird constructions that they build. They have crates and bins full of pieces. They use them to create whatever they want.
In my personal opinion, people who look at a spaceship kit and sniff that it can only ever be used to build a spaceship and therefore it sucks, are experiencing a rather uniquely grown-up failure of imagination.
Not sure you’re talking about the same thing they’re complaining about. Specialised Lego has been around for a long time - I’ve got bits of Space, etc Lego in my collection, but there are sets out there that are composed of quite large, clip-together sections that haven’t as much potential to be used flexibly - for example, the pirate ship parts are like large, prefabricated constructed sections of bricks.
What about my own legos? Do they count?
My wife found a Lego Technics set for some sort of spacecraft on sale and bought it; she picks up stuff on sale that might make a good present, and we had a nephew nearing the right age. Then it disappeared, and reappeared, but never quite at the right time to gift it; then we moved. Finally, maybe 15 years later, a different nephew reaches the right age, so we give it to him.
First thing on opening it, his mother’s BF googles it, and evidently it’s worth hundreds of dollars, still shrink-wrapped. Mother and/or grandmother quickly open it and start playing with the parts, to avoid any negotiation and spoiling the kid’s birthday party. My hat’s off to the ladies! And go figure on what people will spend money on!
Thank you, that’s exactly what I’m talking about. NOT talking about blue windshields and dish antennas.
That doesn’t seem to me what Lego is about.
Who still buys Lego in a B&M store and not online?
I think MsWhatsIt was right about failure of imagination. Those aren’t just pirate ship hull parts. using some advanced techniques , they’re anything from airship gasbags to spaceship bodies.
I first encountered this with 2nd gen Castle - the wall sections were wonderful stuff for getting volume in constructions without weight and time spent building walls brick-by-brick.
That’s two things. Any more?
What, you want me to do all your imagining for you? Robot bodies, legs on a giant mech, gas tanks at a refinery, walls for an oasthouse…anything that needs an oval tank shape or a boat shape…
…plus, like I said, Lego still sells the old kind of brick, so knock yourself out with those.
Would you not concede that a large collection of smaller parts that can be assembled into any shape at all, requires more imagination than a small collection of parts that already have a macroscopic shape?
Sure, just mathematically there’d be less possible numbers of combinations in any one set. But that’s a failure in what sets get bought for kids, not a failure of that specialized shape’s existence.
As a Lego builder who uses shapes from lots of sets and ranges, mostly for steampunky things, I find premade ship hulls a boon, not a hindrance. And you’ll never get a smooth hull without those parts, so Lego’s used them for their ships since the 80’s.
Sorry, make that “since the 70s”. I had this set in the 80s.
Basically, my argument is: Lego’s had specialized parts as long as most of us have been playing with it. Yet the nostalgiacs always act as though this is a failure of modern Lego sets. This is just rosy retrospection.
You may be right. I think the distribution/weighting of those specialised parts has shifted though - 30 to 40 years ago, if you bought one of every shelf-available set from your local store and dumped them all out on the floor, you had a lot of generic bricks and a few specialised hull/roof/vehicle parts.
Now if you were to do the same, you have a lot more of the big, prefab shapes and far fewer of the generic bits. It’s quite easily possible for a kid’s modern Lego collection to be dominated by large, awkward shapes and, although you are right that with enough imagination, these can all be repurposed, they don’t provide a learning curve for that advanced imagination to develop.
As you also say, it’s not that there is no solution to this - standard parts are still widely available - in fact my own large collection of Lego (all acquired within the last 12 years or so) contains a lot of basic and smaller parts - because I bought much of it second hand.
One of the things I found most enjoyable about the Lego Movie was that the construction was dominated by basic parts.
There’s nothing wrong with rosy retrospection, and disappointment about the exact shape of change is not always ‘failure of imagination’ (I actually find that pretty insulting).
I think the overall number of Lego kits nowadays counters this. Also the fact that the larger Star Wars kits (Millennium Falcon, Star Destroyer, etc) use a metric fuck-ton of very basic parts, often in very clever ways (incorporating some of those unconventional SNOT-style techniques, even.)
Like I said, not if you include the Star Wars sets (and count-for-count, they’ll have by far the most parts). That range is one of their most popular (and those were both on the shelf at my local toystore). I own the fist one and it’s mostly generic parts (assuming you consider the classic triangular wing-plates to be generic)
My daughter’s collection is quite full of generic bits. The most specialized parts, I’d say, are actually the Bionicle sets she inherited from me. And I always considered those a side-line product, not real Lego…
It was Classic Space nostalgia for me 
I’m sorry I insulted you, but I do think there is something wrong with rosy retrospection - if it leads people to avoid buying Lego for their kids because of their mistaken perceptions of the modern Lego ‘ecosystem’.
On the other hand, in the middle of the night, effing nothing will wake you up faster. :eek:
My answer is COSTCO-related; have kids, so must shop at COSTCO. Some of the huge sized products there (cat litter for example) are sold in 5 gallon plastic buckets with metal swivel handles. After what was in them gets used,
and once cleaned, they make great toy storage containers, LEGOs especially.
Also, keep an eye out at work for someone who has a kid 5 years younger than yours. The day will come when the LEGOs will collect dust and it will be time for them to be in someone else’s feet.
“Say, does your kid like LEGOs?”
“Yeah… loves em!”
“Og they are so expensive though, right?”
“You’re not kidding! Eighty bucks for that last box.”
"You know, my kid used to LOVE those LEGOs… but he grew out of them. Say, would your kid like some free LEGOs?
“Would he? Sure…! How many have you got?”
“Twenty gallons…” 
Our kids have dozens of sets, from 15-piece sets that come in a bag to 2,000-piece sets. As I mentioned above, we have the parts sorted by type. The vast majority of the pieces are generic bricks and plates. They fill 8 buckets. Another bucket holds vehicle parts (wheels, axles, windscreens, etc.). There’s a bucket for doors and windows. One for Bionicles. And one for the parts you’re talking about. That bucket has plenty of room left.
Yes, there are large molded parts in some sets. They are pretty rare and that pirate ship is an outlier. I would bet that they tried to design the pirate ship set to use generic bricks and they couldn’t make it structurally sound enough for play. What good is a set if it falls apart when you pick it up?
I see bins like thisall over the place. There are several variations.
I also ran into this set of just brickswhen I was looking for a link to the above. Check out the reviews before you buy it, though, as it sounds like it’s really heavy on the little pieces.
I fully agree. As does the Lego movie.
Lego is about whatever you want it to be about. That’s kind of the point.