Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

Why Tired People Talk About Being 'Out of Spoons.' Why Nouns Are More Complicated Than You May Think.

Episode Summary

A few months ago, I started to notice people talking about spoons in a weird way, so I investigated and found that people are using an interesting concept called "spoon theory." Also this week, we look at why nouns are more complicated than you may think, and we dig into concrete, abstract, collective, and compound nouns--how you can identify them, how you can tell them apart, and what makes them fun. | SPONSORS: https://masterworks.io/about/disclosure and https://bit.ly/ggondemand with the code MACMIL | Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates. | Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing course. | Peeve Wars card game.  | Grammar Girl books.  | HOST: Mignon Fogarty | VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475) | Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network. | Theme music by Catherine Rannus at beautifulmusic.co.uk. | Links: https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/ https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/podcasts https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/subscribe https://www.tiktok.com/@therealgrammargirl http://twitter.com/grammargirl http://facebook.com/grammargirl http://facebook.com/grammargirl http://instagram.com/thegrammargirl https://www.linkedin.com/company/grammar-girl

Episode Notes

A few months ago, I started to notice people talking about spoons in a weird way, so I investigated and found that people are using an interesting concept called "spoon theory." Also this week, we look at why nouns are more complicated than you may think, and we dig into concrete, abstract, collective, and compound nouns--how you can identify them, how you can tell them apart, and what makes them fun.

| SPONSORS: https://masterworks.io/about/disclosure and https://bit.ly/ggondemand with the code MACMIL

| Subscribe to the newsletter for regular updates.

| Watch my LinkedIn Learning writing course.

| Peeve Wars card game.

| Grammar Girl books.

| HOST: Mignon Fogarty

| VOICEMAIL: 833-214-GIRL (833-214-4475)

| Grammar Girl is part of the Quick and Dirty Tips podcast network.

| Theme music by Catherine Rannus at beautifulmusic.co.uk.

| Links:

https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/

https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/podcasts

https://www.quickanddirtytips.com/subscribe

https://www.tiktok.com/@therealgrammargirl

http://twitter.com/grammargirl

http://facebook.com/grammargirl

http://facebook.com/grammargirl

http://instagram.com/thegrammargirl

https://www.linkedin.com/company/grammar-girl

Episode Transcription

Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today, we’ll talk about spoons, and then we’ll talk about why nouns are more complicated than you might think.

Why Are People Saying They Are ‘Out of Spoons’?

A few months ago, I started to notice people talking about spoons in a weird way.

First, my amazing fiction writing and podcasting friend Mur Lafferty tweeted, “I have no spoons for making decisions today.” And then just a few days later, a linguist friend named Lauren Ackerman tweeted, “Trying to remind myself that just because I have *some* spoons does not mean I have *enough* spoons,” And I’m like, “What is up with all these spoon references?” And maybe you’ve heard something like this and wondered too.

So I got a general sense of what it means from the context – spoons are a metaphor for energy – but why spoons?

Well, you won’t find it in any major dictionary, and I have to confess that for reasons I can’t remember now, I thought it had something to do with “Game of Thrones,” but of course, it does not. It turns out this really useful concept, which is called Spoon Theory, also isn’t that new. It’s actually been around since 2003, but I do think it’s moving more into the mainstream.

Here’s the deal:

A woman with lupus named Christine Miserandino  came up with the metaphor on the fly when she was a college student, and her good friend and roommate asked her what it felt like to have lupus – not what the symptoms were, but what it felt like to live with lupus.

The two women were in a dining hall, and after casting around for a few seconds, Christine grabbed a bunch of spoons and handed them to her friend. Then she said something like “Imagine that every time you do something, it costs you a spoon.” Getting out of bed? One spoon gone. She took a spoon away. Showering? Another spoon gone. And so on. She went on to explain that people with disabilities or who are sick start with fewer spoons than other people, and some things that wouldn’t cost a healthy person any spoons at all, like maybe getting dressed, can cost someone with lupus a spoon or two.

And the friend started to realize that Christine had to manage her metaphorical spoons because she only got so many each day. When you have a chronic illness or disability, you aren’t going to be able to do every single thing you want or need to do before you run out of spoons.

Christine wrote up the story on her blog, butyoudontlooksick.com (which does not appear to be online anymore, but is available through the Internet Archive), and Spoon Theory was born.

People have found this concept so useful that it’s become widespread, and people even use the hashtag #spoonie in posts that talk about illness or managing energy, and people sometimes refer to the “spoonie community.”

And people are coming up with more and more creative ways to use the concept. For example, you can talk about having a “low spoon day,” and I even saw someone use it as a verb and say they were “spooned out right now.”

So if you’ve been curious about references to spoons like I've been, that's the scoop. I hope you found the answer as fascinating as I did.

—------

Types of Nouns

A student named Caley sent me this message:

“My writing teacher loves your book and uses it a lot. I would like for you to explain concrete, compound, abstract, and collective nouns.”

Thanks, Caley!

I remember learning that a noun is a person, place, or thing; but unfortunately, it’s more complicated than that.

Concrete Nouns

People, places, and things are all concrete nouns. They’re things you can see or touch such as kittens and puppies, trees and flowers, sticks and stones, and cities and countries.

Abstract Nouns

People often find abstract nouns more confusing. They’re things such as concepts, feelings, ideas, states of mind, and attributes. For example, "honor," "loyalty," "courage," "truth," and "freedom" are all abstract nouns.

If you have an abstract word like those, and you want to test whether it’s really a noun, one way to do it is to see if you can replace the word with one that is more recognizable to you as a noun—a concrete noun.

For example, let’s say you have this sentence:

I’m out of gumption today.

If you want to figure out whether "gumption" is a noun, see if you can replace it with a concrete noun:

I’m out of milk today.

You can. You can replace "gumption" with the concrete noun "milk," so it’s a good bet that "gumption" is an abstract noun.

Try it with this sentence:

Don’t you have any decency?

Is "decency" a noun in that sentence? Sure, because you can replace it with other nouns:

Don’t you have any rocks?

Don’t you have any kittens?

Don’t you have any trees?

Words sometimes serve multiple purposes too, so a word such as "hate" can be both an abstract noun and a verb.

In this sentence it’s a verb:

I hate fishing.

In this sentence it’s an abstract noun:

Don’t bring your hate in here.

No need to get confused though. You can still use the concrete-noun test to see when it’s a noun. When you can replace "hate" with a concrete noun, then you know it’s probably playing a role as an abstract noun:

Don’t bring your dog in here.

Don’t bring your fish in here.

Don’t bring your cookies in here. (Well, on second thought, the cookies are fine.)

Since you can replace "hate" with the nouns "dog," "fish," and "cookies," "hate" is a noun in the sentence "Don’t bring your hate in here."

Collective Nouns

Collective nouns are a type of concrete noun. (That may be why people find all these different categories hard to understand—there’s overlap between them.)

Collective nouns are words that describe a group of things, usually people:

band

board

class

committee

team

In American English, we tend to treat collective nouns as singular, so although there are multiple people in a band or on a team, we treat them as one thing:

The band is playing tonight.

The board is meeting tomorrow.

The class is doing a project on kittens.

The committee is planning an event.

The team is selling custom made maracas to raise money.

Nouns of Assembly

A particularly fun type of collective noun is what are called “nouns of assembly” or “terms of venery.” These are phrases that typically describe a group of animals, such as

a pride of lions

a murder of crows

But they can sometimes also describe people who have certain kinds of jobs, and sometimes people also make up funny or clever new ones such as

a blister of shoes

a forest of books

an agony of dentists

I just made those up.

But the real terms go all the way back to the 1400s when they appeared in books about hawking, hunting, and heraldry, the most famous of which was called the Book of St. Albans.

Compound Nouns

Compound nouns are usually nouns that are made up of two other words, and they can be formed three different ways:

The frustrating thing about compound nouns is that they change over time. Often they’ll start as open or hyphenated compounds and then merge into a single word, and different dictionaries will show them written in different ways.

For example: "tree-hugger." Collins Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary have it hyphenated, but Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary has it as an open compound.

It’s common to find those differences between compound words in dictionaries. The best thing you can do is pick one dictionary and use it as your guide.

Nouns can be categorized in even more ways. If you want more, read this article about common nouns and proper nouns.

Finally, this week, Joyce from Connecticut called in with a familect story of her granddaughter using the same word for hand sanitizer that another listener called about last year: “hanzitizer.” So I guess that one is common or spreading. Thanks for that call Joyce, and it reminded me of another story I got about a name for hand sanitizer from John.

"Hi Mignon this is John McKay from lovely New England calling from Cricket Massachusetts. I'm calling because of a familect story I have. It's something that just me. My wife and my three boys use, and the word is dubbies. It means the hand sanitizer. Started with my first boy, you know, over nine years ago where we were telling him to don’t forget to run and dub when you’re using the hand sanitizer. So soon that morphed into dubbies. So now we go around all the time and some to think it's funny that we say, “Hey time to do the dubbies. Time to use some dubbies, and just keep the phrase that we use, and it's just ingrained. And that's what we use. Thank you for the show. The books. I really enjoyed the podcast. Thanks."

Thanks, John!

If you want to call with the story of your familect, a word your family and only your family uses, you can leave a voicemail at 83-321-4-GIRL. Call from a nice, quiet place, and I might play it on the show.

I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.

Thanks to my audio engineer, Nathan Semes, and my editor Adam Cecil. Our assistant manager is Emily Miller, and our marketing and publicity assistant is Davina Tomlin, who once attended a clown-ballroom-dance event and had fun but would not go again. And our Ad Operations Specialist is Morgan Christiansen.

That’s all. Thanks for listening.