Hello.
Thanks everyone for your answers last week to my question concerning compound nouns (task machine, toy producer). However, I'd like to clear one more issue:
Is it legal to leave a noun in plural, if I put it under quotation marks - tasks machine is incorrect, but what if I use it like this: ... "tasks" machine ...
with the intention of emphasizing something?
Best regards,
Miroslav

david56 (Email Removed) wrote on 28 Nov 2003:

I think this is a bit chickenshit, myself. Rather than using a confusing adjective like tasks in scare quotes before the noun it modifies, why not just stick it into a complement phrase that follows "machine"? Then you could say cool things like "a machine that does/performs tasks" or "a machine that tirelessly completes all tasks" or "a machine to which tasks are a piece of motoroil-cake".

You'd be emphasizing a linguistic weakness only (sic).

Yes, yes. A complete sentence, by all means. Like the previous two and this one.

No. That applies only to the language police, the guys who arrest you when you say illegal things like "I want to bleep the blarp" when you're at the airport or in front of the White House or wherever.

Watch out, David. Such sentiments can get you into lots of trouble with long-winded people. I merely suggested that earlier this week and was duly taken to task for my heresy.

There may be no body, but that doesn't mean murder has not been committed over words. And there are plenty of us who'll be happy to say what is right and wrong, even without being payed (sic) or obeyed.

Franke: EFL teacher & medical editor.

"M.Jovanovic" (Email Removed) wrote on 28 Nov 2003:


Technically, all three of my sentences are "complete sentences". They are normal English, quite grammatical in context, and they begin with a capital and end with a period. Okay, so they're fragments, but they are complete utterances. The rule about needing a subject and predicate is a bit unyielding and unrealistic.
Technical documents often contain expressions that would never occur in a more reasonable non-technical kind of English. Medical English contains some doozies too. There really isn't anything one can do about them unless one knows exactly what they mean and exactly what they should be. To know how to render "tasks machine" correctly, we would have to be able to read the description of what the machine does. You've got that description. It is quite possible that there is some technical term "tasks machine".

I always go to the Internet and check out the medical publications for usage problems. If something like that occurred in one of the papers I edit, I'd go to PubMed, type in "tasks machine", and see how many hits I got in the NHI database of millions of medical articles. If I couldn't find any, I'd go to Google and do the same thing. After checking out both sources, I'd probably have all the info I needed to decide what "tasks machine" should be and how to use it.

No guarantees, of course. Sometimes I come up empty, so I have to ask the author.

I read your original post, so I know what you were asking. I was just having a bit of fun with david56 there. He claimed in his reply that there was no such thing as Standard English, so I wanted to shake him up a bit by saying some of-the-wall things.
I don't remember if anyone mentioned that there's a significant difference between British English and American on the point of plural attributive noun-adjectives like "drug company" (American) and "drugs company" (British, I think). In general, British English allows plurals but American doesn't. It's not a big deal except for the customer, and the customer is always right about that sort of thing.

Yes, you're right. It's always possible that the document is defining a new term, and who are you or who is anyone else to say that the inventor of the term cannot spell it any way that he or she chooses to. As long as the term is used consistently thoughout the document, it doesn't matter if it violates the so-called rules of Standard English. All languages allow for that kind of exception.

Franke: EFL teacher & medical editor.

david56 (Email Removed) wrote on 28 Nov 2003:

No "Oy!"s allowed for seeming to have violated the rules of Standard English, even what might be construed as a spelling error. "off-the- wall" means whatever it is bounced or rebounded, but "of-the-wall" means that whatever it is dislodged and fell while one was sleeping perpendicular to and beneath it. Hasn't that ever happened to you?

Franke: EFL teacher & medical editor.

Broadly speaking, that is harmless if not employed as a regular practice. If the context has repeatedly referred to tasks (or any noun in the plural, let's say Xs) *and* the ordinary form "X machine" (or "X whatever") for some reason seems inadequate, one can use the "Xs" machine (or whatever) form as a nonce form.
I am straining to come up with a generalization, but I suppose the usage again, as a nonce form would pass muster if the normal term "X whatever" seems to describe a nonexistent or impossible kind of thing. One might say that one does not get one's creative ideas from some "ideas" machine in one's brain, or some unusual thing like that.
One could also use the form, as a nonce form, if the "Xs" at issue is regarded as unlikely or unreal, at least in connection with the "machine" or whatever. I cannot at once think of an example.
Finally, we use the plural Xs without quotation marks when the singular would deceive. "As a small-time actor, he earned most of his money in cheap sci-fi movies as a Martians portrayer." A device to locate concealed cigarettes (as might be used by border police to stop smuggling) would be, in colloquial, a smokes detector, not a smoke detector.

But the quotation marks, even when tolerable, which is rarely, are not for "emphasis" they denote what they contain as not exactly what the phrase suggests.

Cordially,
Eric Walker
My opinions on English are available at
http://owlcroft.com/english/