Discussion Groups / British English / September 2007

I can't answer your question, but healthcare is services rather than goods,
isn't it?

"I'll have three healthcares, please!"

Cheers
Tony

While I don't like 'good' it is sure that if there is a plural there is
a singular, so good is acceptable? genrally though, as you've seen, it
is 'goods' and one adjust the rest of the phrase to suit rather than
using 'good'. If I needed the singular I would use another word,
product, material etc.

Does it come from economic theory?  I've an idea (subject to correction)
that in that context it mens something like "benefit".

Illiteracy?

My only suggestion is that it's crept in somehow from the sphere of
economics. I wasn't previously aware it was somehow offensive.

FWIW Chattel is entirely acceptable in the singular, despite it often
implies plurality, particularly with the hazy etymology whereby, well,
it could mean capital, it could mean cattle, but the talk is of goods
and chattels.

I was pretty sure that Economics graduates of 15 years hence used
the term in its singular.

Or perhaps it simply reflects the fact they were all too cool to tell
me it wasn't a normal usage within their discipline when my use of
it in the singular went unchallenged!

Perhaps the OED bods are too busy with all the new made-up words
that meeja types like to saturate the language with to read such
publications
as The Economist, The New Statesman, The Spectator, possibly some
of the less red-brick semi-academic journals in market research and/or
supermarket retailing--the ones that are slightly too respectable to count
as mere trade-press titles but are still "accessible" enough to not really
cite
statistical data.

Otherwise it seems to heark back legal language at a point in time when
the language underwent a lot of change (Domesday era) and, as such, if
Chattels is an acceptable term whereby an implicit plural by way of
being a mass noun is then pluralised once more then it follows that
if one has two herds of sheep and one keeps them in different fields
then one can indeed farm sheeps, possibly even sheepses.

Whatever, I certainly second your logic that "now only" implies it
has been used in the singular previously. I thought the Sale of Goods
Act and suchlike used the plural mainly for convenience.

In short, I'm sure I've used it myself on numerous occasions and nobody's
batted an eyelid but can't recall any particular time any authority has used
it in the singular.

Logic seems to dictate that there is no problem discussing a "service"
in the singular and economic theory talks of Goods and Services and,
as they to be compared as homogeneously as possible when it comes
to such frameworks as marginal pricing and marginal utility then it's
somewhere language fails to represent the world around us if singular
instances are somehow prohibited.

Add to that the fact that GNP and GDP and suchlike use "product"
in the singular when they mean the totality of all goods, services and
net economic gain for a given period of time (from memory not textbook
if the definition is at odds with Digby and his stat's-winking chums)

Thus I accept the BBC's usage in this instance.

G DAEB
COPYRIGHT (C) 2007 SIPSTON
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