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A New Name to Make Communication Easier?
By your editing blogger, Carolyn Howard-Johnson,
book and marketing consultant, writer and,
when my life needs a dose of joy, a poet, too!
The title of his “Vocabulary Habit” puzzles you, well, that’s why it’s here. One of my frequent vocabulary builders that comes to my mailbox unbidden maybe once a day (Word Smart) told me that they about “noncount nouns.” Well, do tell. Yep, there are all kinds of easy endings for most nouns. “-es,”, just plain -s,” and some harder ones “-ies” for words like “babies” that can be counted. Some nouns like “man” are loners and require have their own needs that must be followed (just like “men!”) Ya just gotta know. (That’s where a good teach or model comes in handy!)
Some belong to categories like “games.” We hardly notice them because they need no change. “Hockey.” “Chess.” “Baseball” become something else if we try to make it a plural with an Sand somehow we just know it!
But what if we tutor English as a second language, teach, happened to be an immigrant or a second generation speaker of two or more languages. (Lucky them!)
We also know there are a few things that can’t be counted; they don’t tend to give most of us or our associates much trouble. Some are loners that obey the rules the “e” and “es” type rules and some belong to categories like “games.” We won’t find plurals available for “hockey” or “chess.” The students we tutor might barely notice., either. Yep, they are noncount nouns.
Some give us trouble and when it comes time to discuss explain, it helps to have the vocabulary to help with that, a term that helps delineate them all because we’ll need to tell them about the helper word that with our fellow writers, our students, our clients, it’s kind of nice to be equipped with a word that deliniates them. When we find nouns we know can be counted we go to words like "enough," "some," "any," “much,” "plenty of," and "no."
But even they can be tricky. Word Smart gives us this example:
"’There aren’t many coffee left,’ since "coffee" is a noncount noun. (You might order ‘three coffees,’ but that’s actually an abbreviated form of ‘cups of coffee’ as "cups" can be counted.) The informal modifier ‘a little bit of’ also should be used only with noncount nouns, as in, "We got a little bit of rain today.’
And, that fellow writers, is why it helps to have a simple, straightforward word to describe them as we explain our crazy home-grown language to them. Hooray for “noncount.”
PS: You’ll also want to touch on group words like when the infamous “goose” becomes “gaggle” of “geese.” You’ll find a list of them on “Google” and, yes, that might present a problem of its own. Ahem!
“Careers that are not fed die as readily
. Learn more about her other authors' aids at 
on the Resources for Writers page. She blogs on all things publishing (not just editing!) at her