cellio | (no subject)

I used to think I wanted the internet in my brain, but I've reconsidered.

The phone rang around 8:30 this morning. That was early enough to be plausibly important, so I answered. The caller butchered my name (my last name doesn't even have several of those morphemes); my suspicion that it was a junk call was soon confirmed.

She was calling from "Concerned Women for America". She got about three more words out before I said "don't call me again" and hung up. That was based on the rudeness of a solicitation at that hour, but I also had a negative reaction to the name of this group I'd never heard of before, and I found myself wanting to look them up while on the phone, with no computer immediately to hand. Every word in that name except "for" set off a warning bell (and "for" is on probation due to proximity). Taking them in the order the alarms sounded:

"America": in a political context, high correlation with rabid right-wingerss
"Women": you're going to try to categorize my beliefs, interests, and priorities, and you will be wrong
"Concerned": you have a crusade

If you want to see how I did, check Google. It's not hard.

Maybe I don't want a neural link to the internet. It's much easier to scrub the pollution from a browser cache when it's on disk.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Interesting thought. Certainly 'mail' is a mass noun. But if one wanted to quantify their great quantity of mail, one would use something like 'letters'. However, to say 'letters' when you mean 'email' seems odd. 'Messages' works.

Why is 'email' being a counting noun while 'mail' is a mass noun so unacceptable? They are clearly related, but why must they be in the same grammatical category?

I use "messages" to refer to the countable instances.

Why is 'email' being a counting noun while 'mail' is a mass noun so unacceptable?

The former is clearly a closely-derived form of the latter, so I expect it to follow consistent patterns absent a really good reason for variance. I guess I'm reversing your question: why shouldn't they be the same grammatical category? Patterns in language are useful; why violate them when we don't need to?