Timeline for A problem with "news"
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
5 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan 31, 2019 at 9:28 | comment | added | Chronocidal | @FumbleFingers That's because "trousers" is plural. One "trouser" is just a tube of material. During the middle-ages, people in Europe would wear a tube of material on each leg (a.k.a. "hose" - or, in Scotland, "trews" which then became "trouser") with a codpiece in the centre. Someone then re-invented the idea of stitching both tubes together with some extra material ("a pair of trousers") - which Asians had already been doing since the 10th Century BC for riding horses... | |
| Jan 30, 2019 at 22:34 | comment | added | user91988 | @FumbleFingers That's simply because news doesn't have a plural. "Ones" works in any case where you can refer to the noun as "those", such as "those trousers". No reason to have misgivings about this. | |
| Jan 30, 2019 at 21:36 | comment | added | Bill K | His question is still somewhat valid, why isn't it valid to say "We must distinguish real news from fakes?" | |
| Jan 30, 2019 at 17:23 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | Interestingly, although I have at least "misgivings" about the usage, I found a few dozen written instances of long trousers, not short ones in Google Books. But you're quite right that we definitely can't / don't / won't use that construction with news. | |
| Jan 30, 2019 at 16:49 | history | answered | Jeff Zeitlin | CC BY-SA 4.0 |