Patrick O'Brian Discussion Forum

Bob Bridges
rhbridg@attglobal.net

First, I know that Brits and Yanks and other Anglophones use plurals for different things, but I don't recall reading "the mails" before.  It's probably all over O'Brian and I just never noticed.

But you know, these plural-for-singular nouns keep showing up, and not only in archaic English.  In Hebrew, "sky" is always plural; in English we use both "sky" and "skies" (also "heavens").  We await results more often than the result.  We used to "take the waters" at Aquae Sulis.  People say "data" even when they mean "datum".  (Ok, not quite the same thing.)  In the other direction, we say "hair" and "furniture" when to a Frenchman it's obvious we mean "hairs" and "furnitures", and a Swede would say the same about "paper" / "papers".  I look with interest for the roots of this sort of inconsistency, but I no longer expect it to make sense.

I ran into the same thing when I learned that, unlike our sensible system, the French have this weird habit of referring to some countries with a definite article.  "The United States" is easy to understand, and they say "Germany" and "Brasil" like normal people, but then they turn around and say "the Canada" and "the France".  What's wrong with them, anyway?  Only later did I begin to notice that we say "the Netherlands", "the Vatican" and "the Congo", and I subsided; guess I'll just have to get used to it.

By the way, M. Bâtard, Americans can order "a coffee" too.  Not I—I never learned to like coffee—but I think coffee drinkers are at least as likely to order "a coffee" as they are "a water", or to ask a waitress for "a few more butters" (meaning, of course, a few of those chintzy restaurant-style pats of butter).  And I am definitely as likely to order "a Coke" as "Coke".

Afterthought: Maybe when people said "the mails" they were referring to the packets they received in the mail, in the same way that I receive emails.

On Sat Oct 31, The Last of the True French Short Bastards wrote
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>Americans order coffee, or a cup of coffee. The British, for some unfathomable reason, order "a coffee."

>People do not send me "E-mails," they send me E-mail, a specific instance of which is an E-mail message. I would never say "an E-mail," it's as nonsensical as "a coffee." I say, "an E-mail message," just as I say, "a cup of coffee."

>The example you wanted is of course "mail" itself. You would never say "the postman delivered the mails." You would say "the mail" or "some letters." "The mails" is an archaic usage referring to all mail or occasionally the postal service itself, but as such is ambiguous and therefore bad.

>There's no such thing as "E-mails," except in the archaic King James sense. "God divided the E-mails from the E-mails, and the spam He consignèd unto eternal damnation, for it is an abomination unto Him; yet the messages from His friends, He sorted into each unto its own folder, according to its kind."