“Lego” as a bulk noun is also never correct. “Lego bricks” (and “Lego building sets”, etc.) is correct.
In colloquial use, “Lego” or “Legos” are both fine.
Depends on your variant of English. "Lego’ is a mass noun in pretty much all variants of English; however much of the stuff you have you just have Lego, never Legos. And you can’t have “a Lego”; what you have is a brick, a block or a piece. This is also how the The Lego Group treats the word it its English-language material.
I think it’s only in AmE that “Lego” can be a count noun and, even there, it occurs almost exclusively in the plural. I don’t think that AmE speakers would say that “a Lego” is wrong, but that it’s not idiomatic.
Yes, that’s what I said. Lego is to be used as an adjective, not a noun. So neither Lego nor Legos is correct when referring to bricks as far as the Lego Group is concerned.
But as long as we aren’t being picky, then either one is correct depending on your dialect.
No, that’s wrong. One Lego = one brick is completely idiomatic. Of course it’s a little rare that you ever have to refer to a single Lego, but “pick that Lego up off the floor” vs. “pick those Legos up off the floor” are both the normal way of phrasing things.
I’ve posted this before (in another thread, IIRC) but at my last school the British English teachers and American English teachers almost came to blows over the Logo / Logos question.
That may be true as far as The Lego Group is concerned, but this merely tells us what they would like to be the case. Registering a trademark does not confer the kind of authority over language that The Lego Group might wish. As a trademark holder you can restrain a competitor from using your trademark unlawfully, but that’s the extent of your authority to control how the word is used. As long as we are not using the word to pass off our own products as the products of The Lego Group, you and I can use the word however we like.
How do people use it? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, which reflects observed established usage, Lego is not an adjective but a noun (with the meaning of “a proprietary name for a children’s construction toy consisting of small interlocking plastic pieces, typically building blocks; such pieces collectively”). Like other nouns it can be used attributively — a Lego brick, a Lego set, a Lego house — but that doesn’t make it an adjective. (The OED does record “Lego-like” as a adjective and adverb for things that are similar to Lego.)
And in that sense, Legos is perfectly correct in the US. You can’t have it both ways. Either Lego/Legos are both wrong (according to the Lego Group) or both right (in actual use, depending on dialect). There’s no more right and wrong to the latter than whether the dialect is rhotic or whether organizations should be treated as plural or singular. This isn’t some quirky usage that a dozen people use. Hundreds of millions of people say Legos.
Sure. That’s what I’ve said all along. “Lego” is used differently in different variants of English. What is correct or accepted usage is variant-dependent; there is no reason for assigning an objective validity to one variant’s usage over that of another. So statements like “‘Lego’ as a bulk noun is never correct” need to be qualified; in almost all variants of English, it is correct.
So far as I know there is no variant of English in which Lego is treated as an adjective in the way that The Lego Corporation would apparently like. It’s a noun in all variants, so far as I can see. The point of difference is whether it’s a mass noun or a count noun.
Then we are in violent agreement (you’ll note that I qualified my statements as well). I only emphasized the “never” to parallel @Shakester 's usage in my original response.
More likely " I stepped on a damn Lego"
"AaaYAAAAAAaaahhh… I stepped on a damn Lego brand toy building brick, the brick for SERIOUS PLAY!™ (Serious Play and the Lego name are trademarked by the Lego Group of Companies, Copenhagen, Denmark). And it’s the brick for SERIOUS PAIN, dammit!"
Correct: it’s Daylight saving time. Even Gizmodo got it wrong:
I’ve noticed that Terry Gross (host of “Fresh Air”) consistently uses “anyways” instead of “anyway”.
They were arguing over ancient Greek?
Lego, damn autocorrect.
Myself, I never cared much for Brussel’s sprouts, and as far as I’m concerned, this guy Brussel can keep them.
digression
That’s less noticeable than one of my friends, who is originally from Pennsylvania, saying “whenever” instead of “when.” like “I took that class whenever I was young.” I thought it was just her until I heard someone on a podcast recently do it too.
/digression
There’s the key… I had a roommate from there who spoke a whole different language. He’d red up his room (clean) and put something on the chimbly (chimney, apparently also applied to the mantelpiece).
Most notably, I learned they have a second-person plural: Yins.
Etymology; Scots-Irish in origin?
“Yins comin’ with?”
That was Pittsburgh, farther west it might be Yuns.
I think that would mean, for example, “I was young on Tuesdays and Thursdays and some holiday weekends, and on those days I took that class.”
I’ve told her that and she just rolls her eyes.