Month: March 2009

“hospital” vs. “church” or “school” or “town”

Nouns, Versus

Americans would say any of these statements:

* “Are you going to church?”

* “He went to school.”

* “They drove to town.”

But nearly no American would say, “She went to hospital.”

Nearly all Americans would say instead, “She went to the hospital.”

In contrast, probably everyone from Great Britain would say, “She went to hospital.”

What fascinates me is that Americans use “the hospital” — with the definite article “the” — to refer vaguely to any hospital, just as they use “church” or “school” or “town” without the definite article “the” to refer vaguely to any church, school, or town, respectively.

“Listing”

Devolution toward Simpler, Nouns

Telephone companies refer to an entry in a telephone book as a “listing”.

Real-estate agents refer to an item in a list of for-sale properties as a “listing”.

But the noun “listing” describes the process of creating a list.

I wonder why such an entry in a list is not called a “listed” instead.

The word “listed” makes as much sense as the word “listing” to refer to an entry in a list.

Perhaps the use of “listing” in place of “listed” is consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” linguistic hypothesis.

After all, it is simpler to say “listing” than it is to say “listed”.

“It is a quality product.”

Adjectives, Nouns, Outsider's Perspective

This is a popular statement in American English now.

For fun, I searched Google for “It is a quality product.” (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about 30,100 exact matches.

But this statement means nothing except for the positive implication that speakers and writers want to give it.

Someone usually says “It is a quality product.” to tell the listener that “it” is a high-quality product.

But the noun “quality” by itself has no positive or negative value.

Can you imagine someone, such as a non-native-English speaker, first reading or hearing “It is a quality product.”?

This statement would be meaningless to such a person.

The noun “quality” must be hyphenated with an adjective to form a compound adjective that can indicate the value of the noun — in this case, “product” — that the compound adjective modifies.

In contrast to the inherently meaningless statement “It is a quality product.”, here are some meaningful statements:

  • “It is a high-quality product.”
  • “It is a low-quality product.”
  • “It is a good-quality product.”
  • “It is a bad-quality product.”

So respond with a “Huh?” the next time that someone says to you a statement such as “It is a quality product.”, and see what happens.