On Wed, 10 Apr 2013, Simon McVittie wrote: > <hat class="native-en_GB-speaker"> > I've mostly seen whitespace used as a "mass noun", like water or > sand: you can say "whitespace is ignored" or "a sequence of > whitespace", but not "a whitespace" or "whitespaces", in the same > way that it's correct to say "some sand", "a piece of sand" or "a > cubic metre of sand", but not "a sand" or "sands".
Slight nitpick: you can (almost) always refer to collections of mass nouns in a plural form. So whitespaces and sands are perfectly reasonable to use, but then they refer to multiple separate whitespace-containing areas, or multiple separate sand-containing areas. Don Armstrong -- Only one creature could have duplicated the expressions on their faces, and that would be a pigeon who has heard not only that Lord Nelson has got down off his column but has also been seen buying a 12-bore repeater and a box of cartridges. -- Terry Pratchet _Mort_ http://www.donarmstrong.com http://rzlab.ucr.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-policy-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20130410161904.gm15...@teltox.donarmstrong.com
