# That's a lot of \[collective noun\] you got on that table there.... **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [June 24, 2010, 1:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thats-a-lot-of-collective-noun-you-got-on-that-table-there/544300 "2010-06-24T01:27:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Rigamarole](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/77aa72/32.png) [@Rigamarole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rigamarole)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2010, 7:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thats-a-lot-of-collective-noun-you-got-on-that-table-there/544300/21 "2010-06-24T07:47:37Z")
> [@BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed](#): > > Why are some nouns both countable and uncountable? The words you are looking for are not “countable” and “uncountable” but discrete (countable) vs. continuous (infinitely divisible) quantities. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2010, 7:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thats-a-lot-of-collective-noun-you-got-on-that-table-there/544300/22 "2010-06-24T07:49:41Z")
> [@Koxinga](#): > > Don’t think so. In the first instance, “much” is modifying the noun “spoor”, not the (pseudo?) adjective “deer.” In the second instance, “much” is modifying the unspoken noun “meat.” Did I use those exact phrase sin a perfectly correct English sentence. Why, I believe I did. So I win. 😛 ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2010, 12:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thats-a-lot-of-collective-noun-you-got-on-that-table-there/544300/23 "2010-06-24T12:57:37Z")
> [@Rigamarole](#): > > The words you are looking for are not “countable” and “uncountable” but discrete (countable) vs. continuous (infinitely divisible) quantities. Wins the thread. ---
**Author:** ![Omar\_Little](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/omar_little/32/269_2.png) [@Omar\_Little](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Omar_Little)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2010, 1:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thats-a-lot-of-collective-noun-you-got-on-that-table-there/544300/24 "2010-06-24T13:23:47Z")
It’s all about context. There is no one answer to satisfy every situation. ---
**Author:** ![glowacks](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/glowacks/32/5548_2.png) [@glowacks](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/glowacks)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2010, 1:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thats-a-lot-of-collective-noun-you-got-on-that-table-there/544300/25 "2010-06-24T13:42:58Z")
> [@Rigamarole](#): > > The words you are looking for are not “countable” and “uncountable” but discrete (countable) vs. continuous (infinitely divisible) quantities. I gleaned this distinction fairly soon in the thread, and wondered if I was going to get to post it myself. When you puree the peaches, you get a continuous glob of them. Before they were in discrete units. A huge peach might be “a lot of peach” because below the single unit of “one peach” there’s the continuous fruit of the peach that cannot be counted. Using “counted” there makes me wonder: the atoms/cells of the peach _can_ be counted (assuming peachness extends to cellular level), just not on a human scale. Is there ever a case where you would use a different word for a case where there is actually an infinite number of something? What about the difference between countable and uncountable infinities? Ok, that last paragraph was silly. ---
**Author:** ![Darth\_Panda](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/ee7513/32.png) [@Darth\_Panda](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darth_Panda)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2010, 1:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thats-a-lot-of-collective-noun-you-got-on-that-table-there/544300/26 "2010-06-24T13:59:39Z")
> [@Notassmartasithought](#): > > But you can’t have lots of rashers of bacon, or not much slices of bacon. You could have seven lots of rashers of bacon. Or seven too few lots of rashers of bacon… ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2010, 2:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thats-a-lot-of-collective-noun-you-got-on-that-table-there/544300/27 "2010-06-24T14:03:27Z")
> [@BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed](#): > > I’m at a loss to explain this, and enquiring minds of Japanese children want to know. It seems to me that the complexity here is a matter of metaphysics (specifically, ontology), the basic structure of reality, not of language. As such, the Japanese language must surely have a way of dealing with these issues too. How does Japanese deal with the difference between having too many peaches, and having too much peach in your pie? Once you know that, it ought not to be too hard to explain toJapanese people how English copes with it. ---
**Author:** ![Chessic\_Sense](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/7c8e57/32.png) [@Chessic\_Sense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chessic_Sense)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2010, 2:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thats-a-lot-of-collective-noun-you-got-on-that-table-there/544300/28 "2010-06-24T14:32:41Z")
> [@BellRungBookShut-CandleSnuffed](#): > > Hm, that makes sense. If you saw a peach the size of a basketball, you could say that it’s a lot of peach. > > Crap, all of this is making me less and less confident of my ability to communicate it to foriegn high school students. Who don’t even really care much in the first place. Sigh… They’re asking you about Classifiers. They’re confused because Japanese uses classifiers and English very rarely does. So start your lesson off with a discussion of that. Explain that English doesn’t use a strict classifier system and these questions are a relic of that fact. In japanese, you wouldn’t say “I have two cakes”, you’d literally have to say “I have two cake-like objects of cake”. Look [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_counter_word) for another example. So they’re used to saying, essentially, “there are two small animals of cat”, but in English, you’d actually say “There are two cats”. That seems to be where the confusion is coming from. To them, _all things_ are quantifiable. They’ve been saying their whole lives, basically, things like “there’s too much cat”. Explain that there’s no _hiki_ word in English and maybe that’ll set of the lightbulb. ---
**Author:** ![Chessic\_Sense](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/7c8e57/32.png) [@Chessic\_Sense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chessic_Sense)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2010, 2:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thats-a-lot-of-collective-noun-you-got-on-that-table-there/544300/29 "2010-06-24T14:38:06Z")
Missed my edit: Here are some ways to phrase it better than my hackneyed job in my previous post: In Japanese, virtually all nouns must use a counter to express number. In this sense, **virtually all Japanese nouns are mass nouns**. Mass nouns (also uncountable noun or non-count noun) are is a common noun that presents entities as an unbounded mass. In English, these words must be combined with a unit of measure (e.g. liters of water), whereas countable nouns can take an article (a, an, the). Some words are both mass nouns and count nouns, like paper, food, cake, etc. To see the difference, read [Count noun - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count_noun#Linguistic_Differences). ---
**Author:** ![Gordon\_Urquhart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/db5fbb/32.png) [@Gordon\_Urquhart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gordon_Urquhart)\ **Post date:** [June 24, 2010, 7:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thats-a-lot-of-collective-noun-you-got-on-that-table-there/544300/30 "2010-06-24T19:58:37Z")
The OP and ensuing discussion reminds me of my sophomore year in college, when I had a roommate from New Hampshire. If we were out of beer, he’d say, “Let’s go get some beers.” If it had been me, and it had come to my attention that we were out of beer, I’d say, “Let’s go get some beer.” I’d never heard of “beer” being pluralized in that sense before. It’s certainly not incorrect, but it sounds a little strange to me. I wondered, and continue to do so (because I often find myself in a need for more beer), if it’s a regionalism. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/thats-a-lot-of-collective-noun-you-got-on-that-table-there/544300.md?page=1)