Talk:rectification

Tea room discussion
Is rectification countable? The entry currently says uncountable. 500,000 raw googles for rectifications. RJFJR 16:30, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Sounds like you've got your answer.. Ƿidsiþ 16:35, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
 * There are many falsely declared uncountable nouns and not comparable adjectives, readily disproved by the most cursory of searches, even those limited to b.g.c. Why? DCDuring TALK 17:37, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
 * why? cause theres no option in the templates for leaving it blank thats why. it either says what the plural or comparitive is or it says that there is none, theres no "i dont know, leave it for another editor" option 128.252.12.73 17:46, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
 * OK. But why not assume that there is a plural? DCDuring TALK 18:15, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
 * cause ppl dont want to make assumptions like that, safer to say theres no pl than to say "there is one and its whatever" Same for the comparable. the templates need a ? value for the plural parameter to say "i dunno" and categorise it as needs inflection help or sth 128.252.12.73 16:15, 6 August 2008 (UTC)


 * I think there is a need for a "not usually comparable" from of en-adj. There are many adjectives that are comparable, but not that often so used. Circeus 20:27, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
 * Could be. What would be the standard for classification (corpus, relative frequency, other)? As it is now, I personally make a quick assessment as to whether the form would likely meet RfV.
 * For plurals, I check both for the existence of the form and for what number of verb it takes if it looks like a plural.
 * For comparability, I use "more-X-than" as first search, following up with "more-X", then "very-X", "too-X" (for gradability in marginal cases, assuming that gradability usually implies comparability) all in b.g.c., but going to News (some new and regional terms), Scholar (academic terms), or Groups (colloquialisms, neologisms} on occasion.
 * I do not usually check quantitatively for each sense. The complications of doing this quantitatively are significant. Simple criteria seem to be as much as we can hope for over the next few years. I'm not at all convinced that an additional intermediate category helps contributors or users very much at this point. DCDuring TALK 20:52, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
 * I was only thinking of the template, not the categories. I don't think extra categories would help, but having some sort of subtlety for the template (if only in having a way to completely replace the content of the parentheses for the extreme cases) would be simpler at times than having to resort to usage notes. Circeus 21:22, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
 * By category, I meant the normal sense, not ours! Even so, "almost always", "usually", "frequently", "sometime", "rarely" imply quantitative criteria. OTOH, if they would reduce some of the sillier controversies resulting from absolute terminology, they would be useful. DCDuring TALK 22:32, 5 August 2008 (UTC)
 * relying on attestability to say if its comparable is less controversial than debates over sometimes vs frequently vs usually vs rarely vs almost always vs whatever will be 128.252.12.73 16:17, 6 August 2008 (UTC)

The template should say mass noun instead of uncountable (and its counterpart count noun). This seems to be the more common terminology in grammar, and it doesn't rule out counting the noun, merely implies not normally counting it. This is English, people—someone, somewhere is going to be pluralizing everything. —Michael Z. 2008-08-07 23:31 z 


 * That would help for new entries. What is worse is that we have no ability to identify which of the 74,000 nouns that are not marked by the uncountable and countable sense tags are presented to our users as uncountable, mostly by operation of en-noun. I suspect thousands. Many of these are wrong. I'd bet much more than half are at least partially wrong. In our zeal to correct the category (as if most users used it!), we have removed them from the Uncountable English nouns category so that we cannot identify them. DCDuring TALK 00:45, 8 August 2008 (UTC)