1097. Do you wonder whether "bacon" can be plural? We look at the difference between countable and uncountable nouns. Then, we look at how the Martha's Vineyard accent developed and what it tells us about language and society.
1097. Do you wonder whether "bacon" can be plural? We look at the difference between countable and uncountable nouns. Then, we look at how the Martha's Vineyard accent developed and what it tells us about language and society.
The "countable" segment was written by Karen Lunde, a career writer and editor. In the late '90s, as a young mom with two kids and a dog, she founded one of the internet's first writing workshop communities. These days, she facilitates expressive writing workshops, both online and off. Find her at chanterellestorystudio.com.
The "Martha's segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're going to talk about the different ways you can count bacon, and then we'll look at what's interesting about the Martha's Vineyard accent.
by Karen Lunde
Grammar Girl listener Kyle sent me this adorably meaty question. He writes:
This morning, my 3-year-old told me he wanted “a million bacons,” which led to a discussion with my 6-year-old about bites of bacon vs. pieces of bacon. It led me down a rabbit hole of seeing if bacon can be pluralized and I’m finding mixed results. Can you please weigh in on whether or not it’s possible to have a million bacons?
First of all, shoutout to Kyle’s kids for bringing some sizzling linguistic curiosity to the breakfast table! “A million bacons” might not be standard English, but it is a delightful phrase, not to mention a tantalizing visual for bacon lovers to imagine.
It also raises a question: Can "bacon" be plural?
To answer that, we need to get a little nerdy and dig into the difference between countable and uncountable nouns.
Let’s start with the basics.
Countable nouns are nouns you can add a number in front of or that work with words like "many," "few," "several," or "a couple of."
Let's look at bacon's favorite companion: eggs. You can say, "He ate an egg with his breakfast." In that case, "egg" is singular — he ate one egg. Or you can say, "I'd like two eggs and toast." Because "eggs" can be made plural by adding an S, it's a countable noun.
Now compare that to butter. You wouldn’t say, "I'll have two butters." You’d say, "some butter," "a bit of butter," or maybe "a pat of butter." That makes butter an uncountable noun — something we talk about in terms of quantity or portion, not individual units.
And this is where English loves to play tricks on us. Some uncountable nouns feel like they should be countable . . . but they’re not.
For example:
You don’t say “She gave me good advices.”
You say “She gave me good advice.”
You don’t have “three homeworks” to turn in.
You have “three homework assignments.”
You don’t buy “a furniture” or “many furnitures.”
You buy “a piece of furniture” or “some new furniture.”
These nouns — "advice," "homework," "furniture" — are part of a special group called "uncountable nouns," or sometimes "mass nouns." A mass noun is just a noun that refers to something you can’t easily count as separate units. You treat it as a whole — like a pile of laundry, a bowl of rice, or a gob of peanut butter.
That brings us to our breakfast superstar: bacon.
Grammatically speaking, "bacon" is a mass noun. That means you’re not supposed to say “two bacons” or “many bacons.” Instead, you'd say "some bacon," "a lot of bacon," or if you want to be specific, "a slice of bacon", "a strip of bacon", or (if you’re feeling especially British) a "rasher of bacon."
So, let’s get back to that three-year-old dream of "a million bacons." Is it grammatically correct? Not by the book. But is it charming, playful, and understandable? Absolutely.
What’s happening here is something linguists call "reanalysis" — your brain tries to make sense of language based on patterns it already knows. Kids learn early on that if one thing is good, “a million” of them must be amazing. And we can say a million Legos or a million cookies, so why not a million bacons?
This kind of pluralizing happens all the time in casual or humorous speech. Think of people saying things like:
Are those technically correct? Not always, but in context, we get the meaning. We’re talking about cups of coffee or types of cheese. And in Kyle’s kiddo's case, probably strips of bacon.
There are some uncountable nouns that can be pluralized. But doing so usually shifts the meaning. Think of the word "wine." [W-I-N-E] You wouldn’t say, “Squiggly had many wines with his lunch.” (Well, you could, but we might need to stage an intervention.) That’s because "wine" is an uncountable noun — you don’t usually count individual wines the way you’d count, say, muffins or eggs. But in a different context, pluralizing it makes sense: “Aardvark appreciates French wines.” In that case, "wines" refers to different types of wine — merlot, syrah, chardonnay, and so on.
Water works the same way. You wouldn’t say, “Please bring waters for everyone at the table,” unless you were intentionally being silly. But in a poetic or geographic sense, "waters" is perfectly fine: “This is where the Columbia River meets the waters of the Pacific Ocean.” Here, "waters" refers to a specific body or region, not a countable unit, but a vast, named expanse.
"Cheese" is another uncountable noun — you don’t normally say “three cheeses” when you’re counting how much you have in your fridge. You’d say “some cheese” or “a block of cheese” or maybe “a slice.” But at a fancy party (or your favorite grocery store's sample counter), you might hear someone rave about “a selection of fine cheeses.” In that context, "cheeses" refers to different varieties — gouda, manchego, brie — not the number of slices on your plate. So even though cheese is uncountable, its plural form is fair game when you're talking about types.
Sticking with the food examples: You don’t usually say “three breads” — bread is uncountable. But you can count slices of bread or loaves of bread. So instead of “I bought three breads,” you'd say “I bought three loaves of bread.”
That switch — from an uncountable noun to a countable unit — is how we get around the grammar. You’re not counting the stuff itself; you’re counting the portion, package, or type.
So, with countable nouns, the trick is often to pair them with a unit of measurement:
And since we’re talking about countable versus uncountable, we’d be remiss not to take a quick detour into the classic "fewer" versus "less" debate.
Here’s the gist:
So you’d say:
And for the whole big story about "less" versus "fewer" and all the exceptions, check out episode 937 — we covered it about a year ago.
So, to circle back to Kyle's question: Can you have a million bacons? Well, if you’re speaking by-the-book grammar: No, "bacon" doesn’t pluralize that way. You’d say “a million slices of bacon” or “a mountain of bacon” if you're feeling poetic.
But language isn’t always about being correct — sometimes it’s about being expressive or playful. “A million bacons” might not pass an English teacher's red-pen test, but we still know what Kyle's kiddo meant: Give me all that delicious bacon!
So go ahead. Enjoy your bacon, however you count it. Just maybe don’t ask for “a million bacons” at a fancy brunch. Unless, of course, you’re three years old — in which case, carry on, young linguist.
That segment was written by Karen Lunde, a career writer and editor. In the late '90s, as a young mom with two kids and a dog, she founded one of the internet's first writing workshop communities. These days, she facilitates expressive writing workshops, both online and off. Find her at chanterellestorystudio.com.
by Valerie Fridland
When most people meet a linguist, they wonder how many languages they speak. While one sense of the term linguist is someone proficient in a multitude of languages, most people who study linguistics are instead focused on the cognitive and physiological architecture that underlies all languages, rather than being linguistic savants.
Linguists, in the quest to understand how and in what ways languages differ, examine things like why some languages (for example, Inuktitut) have a legion of word endings while others, like Chinese, have none. Such questions are crucial to understanding the larger one of what our internal wiring for language is like and how it gave birth to so many distinct types over time.
But, as the field of language research began to take hold as a scientific field of inquiry, it was only a matter of time until it became obvious that to understand language, one had to look at how it was embedded not just in our brains but also in our societies.
For instance, why do younger speakers and older speakers say things so differently? How could American and Australian English come from the same source dialects but yet turn out bros, gals, mates, and sheilas that sound nothing alike? And, a question very relevant to modern discussions of gender and race discrimination, how is it that we make assumptions about things like someone’s sex or ethnicity from just hearing their voice?
Answering such questions requires a better understanding of how language gives us clues to the identities of the speakers who use it. Previous accounts of language focused on reconstructing earlier forms of language, assuming that all changes could be accounted for by regular linguistic principles.
However, while over time changes might appear orderly and structured, living speakers used variable forms at different times and places, in what often appeared as a chaotic or random fashion. Explaining real speakers’ everyday language use was a very different matter than looking at patterns of language development over time.
But three linguists working at Columbia in New York in the 1960s, Uriel Weinreich, William Labov, and Marvin Herzog, saw promise in looking more deeply at how social motivations interact with linguistic ones.
They suggested that language change grew out of not just language contact, such as that between French and English after the Norman conquest, or natural processes such as changing stress patterns leading to the loss of word-final endings, but as a result of how these factors are influenced by the social structures, groups and sociohistorical events within which they are embedded.
As an example, Bill Labov, one of the study’s authors and the founder of the field of sociolinguistics, pointed to his findings in his 1961 research on the small island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the northeast coast of the U.S., where some very distinctive vowel variants could be heard.
Martha’s Vineyard had long been built on an economy of farming and fishing, but, starting in the '50s and '60s, the island became an increasingly popular vacation destination for wealthy tourists. As tourism began to take over their local economy, this influx from mainlanders was viewed, particularly by those who had made their living as fishmongers, as an incursion and a threat to their traditional way of life.
Labov interviewed many of the original families on the island, finding that the fisherman who lived up-island, where a more rural and traditional lifestyle still dominated, tended to use an older form of a vowel sound in words like "sound" or "about," so that they were pronounced more like "seund" or "aboot." This was opposite the pattern on the mainland and among the youngest speakers who planned to move off the island, where the more typical modern pronunciation had become the norm.
Middle-aged speakers who lived on the island, especially those who shared the view that the tourists were impacting their traditional livelihood and lifestyle, had also started to adopt this unique vowel pronunciation as a marker of what it means to be a true "Islander."
In short, by using older, more traditional vowels, these speakers showed verbal resistance to the incursion of outsiders and the loss of traditional occupations and values. Use of this local norm aligned with speakers' attitudes toward the social and economic shifts taking place in their community.
What this study showed is that language contact, physiology, and historical developments alone could not explain why speech on Martha’s Vineyard had developed as it had. Though the seeds for the signature pronunciations in words like "toide" (tide) and "heus" (house) might have been planted by earlier settlers, the resurgence of these forms, particularly only among one specific set of speakers, was deeply engaged with the lifestyles of those on the island and the threat they perceived from outside forces.
Only by understanding language in its social context can the sound changes on the island be understood. This study proved foundational to the field of modern sociolinguistics and to illuminating how deeply language change is tied to social triggers.
While it is perhaps not surprising that catastrophic events like colonization, wars, and resettlement might change the course of language, sociolinguistic studies such as that in Martha’s Vineyard illustrate that much more subtle differences—things like what we do for a living or our ethnic background—can be equally impactful on shaping our linguistic choices and influencing how others perceive us. And, in fact, much sociolinguistic work since has even further proved that social meaning is a crucial part of what drives not just what we say, but, importantly, the way we say it.
References
Weinreich, Uriel, William Labov and Marvin Herzog. 1968. Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In Winfred P. Lehmann and Yakov Malkiel (eds.) Directions for Historical Linguistics: A Symposium. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press. 97–195.
Labov, William. 1963. The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19: 273–309.
The "Martha's segment was written by Valerie Fridland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of "Like Literally, Dude: Arguing for the Good in Bad English." You can find her at valeriefridland.com.
Finally, I have a familect from Michelle.
Hi, Mignon. My name is Michelle Johnson, and I have a familect story for you. When I was growing up, I used to use the word "murmy" to describe any type of sea sickness or car sickness. It started because my cousin's mother's side of the family is Korean, and there's a word, something like "mer-may," and as a kid, I thought it was an English word and called it "murmy." I thought it was a good word to describe the feeling— sounded right — and later realized no one knew what I was talking about. Same story with "tudgee." "Pig" in Korean is something like "tajae." So, "tudgee" is someone who just gorges himself on food and also another word that no one else understood. But my family loves it. Still use it once in a day. It's my familect story. I love the show. Keep doing what you do.
Thanks, Michelle. And how fun. Those both do sound like they would mean the things you use them to mean. Thanks for the call.
If you want to share the story of your familect, a word or phrase that you only use with your friends or family, leave a message on the voicemail line at 83-321-4-GIRL or leave a voice message on WhatsApp. Be sure to call from a nice, quiet place, and if you want that number or link later, you can always find them in the show notes.
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