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Getting stuck on English

Eileen Tan -- whose skin is fairer than the diminishing snow on Mount Kilimanjaro despite living in itchy-sticky humid Singapore -- sent me an e-mail asking for enlightenment becasue she says she's stuck on sentence construction when writing a press release as part of her job in some boondocks university:

Subject: Expert comment

Date: Tue, 28 Feb 2006 14:23:48 +0800

From: "Eileen"

To: fchin123@yahoo.com

  

Hi Francis,

How have you been? I'm stuck on something... need your advice. :)

Is it:

"More choices at NTU" or

"More choice at NTU"...

and what's the reason for choosing one over the other?

Dear Eileen,

ALL the choices suck. Between mediocre engineering and pseudo-communications subjects, there are few good choices in western Singapore.

Luckily for English, there are choices and rubbery rules in acceptable speech so that we grammar pedants can make good money writing, lecturing and admonishing lesser mortals.

The question here is about countable and non-countable nouns. Is "choice" a discrete, countable noun? Is there a plural form called "choices"? We know there are more than one choice, and we know we can count the number of choices, however limited, in life, except when we get married and all choices (mates, for instance) are suddenly closed to us.

When using a plural adjective "more" to describe a countable noun, we have to use the plural form of the noun, e.g. more apples, more oranges, more choices, and also more difficulties in making the right choice. A certain short story writer, O Henry, once wrote about about a country where the gold comes in plural quantities but in order to survive there, you need to be armed with a couple of Martini Henrys.

When using "more" to describe abstract, non-countable nouns, we need to convert such nouns to something countable by adding a countable modifier in front.

We can't say, there are more "kindnesses" or more "sunshines". Instead, we say we can see more ACTS of kindness in a kampong than in the business district. There are more HOURS of sunshine in summer than in winter.

But to complicate matters, we know that "money" is countable (except when we have too much, like Bill Gates or when we're jobless and there ain't no dollar bills to count!). Strangely, there is no plural form for "money" even though we spend most of our waking hours counting money.

Actually, there is a plural form for money -- monies, but over the centuries, most people, being poor, have only singular not plural monies, hence "monies" is now rarely used.

What about "water", as in "More water in Hong Kong"?

Hongkongers who think "water" sounds like "money" will always welcome more water, preferably a flood flowing into their doorway, like cash. Cold cash, as the Ribald Confucius observed, will warm anyone's heart. Without cash, as my late father observed, everything is hypothetical.

Happiness is a positive cash flow, again observed the Ribald Confucius.

The conclusion is that English-speaking natives -- those from (no-longer Great) Britain -- are a whimsical lot. After making up complicated rules of syntax, semantics, vocabulary and grammar, they then proceed to break the rules by creating so many exceptions that the non-natives become demented when learning English.

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