Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
You are not logged in.
Registrations are currently closed because of a technical problem. Please send email to
The forum administrator reserves the right to request users to plausibly demonstrate that they are real people with an interest in the topic of eggcorns. Otherwise they may be removed with no further justification. Likewise, accounts that have not been used for posting may be removed.
Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Countification is a linguistics term for the expression of a mass noun in countable form, according to Wiktionary, which dug up three examples from the literature, from 1969, 1995, and 2010. A 2002 paper on mass expressions uses both ‘massification’ and ‘countification’, in quotes, and it seems like a natural development when talking about the subject. Arnold Zwicky’s LL post Countification, from 2008, brings the word right out in the open, discussing the countification of porn, shrubbery, e-mail and spam.
The usage proper to linguistics is just the trampoline (sorry, the tremplin in French … I guess that would be “jumping off point”? Excuse? [1]) for this report of an eggcorn suggested by my encounter with ‘countification’ on LL. Any hits for ‘countity’ in place of ‘quantity’? Need you ask?
I don’t believe that the fascist control that happened in Japan and Germany could ever happen in the U.S. A majority of Americans believe in democracy and even if a large countity of people pulled through and tried to take over…
History blog comment
It is pretty easy to escape from Reimu’s wrath just throw any countity of Yen in any direction that is not yours and run like no tomorrow
Youtube gamer tip
It’s present in the various conjugations, though I present only one example.
Gross National Happiness (GNH)
GNH is an uncountifiable concept of development policy measured by the gross well being of people in their spirituality and material prosperity upraised based on religious philosophy.
Happiness wiki
Count is born of L. computare and quantity of L. quantitatem.
As an aside, in Edmonton, Alberta, recently, I was struck by an unusual pluralization on a billboard advertising a festival: More than 200 International Beer!. As if beer were quantified like deer. My Edmontonian niece found nothing strange about this. For me, it sounds as strange as saying, “At the butcher shop, I bought 5 meat.” In the absence of “kinds of”, it doesn’t sound quite right unless pluralized with an s.
[1] Edit: Aha, springboard.
Last edited by David Bird (2013-06-02 18:01:50)
Offline
Lovely find. I suppose “count ‘em mechanics” should really be called “can’t count ‘em mechanics.”
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
Offline