Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Hotpants]

An adamant student tried to insist today that the word 'graphics' - as in the plural of 'graphic' rather than the study subject of 'graphics - can't be correct because his dictionary has the word 'graphic' marked as an uncountable noun. For the life of me, I could swear that using 'graphics' to mean more than one 'graphic' is acceptable. But, I couldn't find any online definitions of the word 'graphics' as a plural.

Can anyone advise?

Is it just a case like 'cactuses' which has become acceptable as the spoken plural of 'cactus' while the dictionary states otherwise?

[Hater Depot]

Uh.. 'graphic' is an adjective and 'graphics' is a noun which is sometimes countable and sometimes uncountable, right?

"That's an excellent school for graphic design."

"The gore in that movie was so graphic!"

or

"The graphics in that game were awesome!"

"There were two really interesting graphics in that collection."

[ChopChaeJoe]

graphic can be singular noun.

[Woland]

Graphics may have once been a field of study, like physics, and thus a non-count singular that appeared as if it were plural. It may have undergone semantic shift, coming to refer to the object of study of the field. In that context, the final -s may have been perceived as plural and a singular, 'graphic' derived from it (as in, "That was a nice graphic you included in your presentation.").

This history is entirely speculative, but possible. Singular graphic could also have developed from the modifier form. It may have a long history as a singular. I'm not interested enough in it to investigate the history of it.

What is important for your student is that his/her dictionary is misleading as far as native speaker use in the real world. I copy the below from the WordNet 2.1 (http://wordnet.princeton.edu/) page entry for graphic:

Noun

S: (n) graphic, computer graphic (an image that is generated by a computer)

While there were no entries for graphic as a singular noun in a concordance of 11 examples I got from the corpora available at the Compleat Lexical Tutor (http://132.208.224.131/), I did find that 4 of 19 (and possibly a fifth) examples in a concordance drawn from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (http://micase.umdl.umich.edu/m/micase/) were of graphic as a singular noun.

Perhaps the other thing to talk about with your student is that fact that practically every word marked as non-count in the dictionary can be used as countable when the context is right:

Basmati and Baldo are really different rices in size, texture and flavor.

Two snows a year is about all we get here.

And so on. These usages may be more common in speech than writing, but they do exist. (And it may be important for students to know that the likeihood of use is different for speech and writing. But the whole count/non-count thing is a generality, rather than an absolute truth.

[denverdeath]

Show your student this(though I think the other posters already explained it adequately):

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/graphics

[Qinella]

Graphic is a countable noun. One graphic. Two graphics. Three graphics. Though it's extremely rare in regular usage to go past one. As for the student's insistence that graphic is uncountable, what word would you use to count it?

Other uncountables:

bread
water
air

A slice of bread. A glass of water. A breath of air. A.... viewing of graphic? WTF? His dictionary is wrong, or s/he's misunderstanding.

Also, I've never heard of "cactuses" being commonly used. Maybe I'm weird. Or, not from Arizona.

[Hotpants]

Thanx for those who responded. Seems like there's no reason to discount graphicS. Today, the student continued the issue (which wasn't really that 'exciting' to start with!), claiming that all his friends have graphic marked as an uncount noun in their own dictionaries. Well, I don't know what dictionaries they are using, but it's all weird. I told him to go and check through the internet for the use of the word. He's studying to become a high school English teacher and he's doing lots of mock English tests with his study group at his college. He's quite fussy on getting exact answers from me, and doubts any claims I make about dictionaries or text books being 'incorrect', so that's why I asked for your input. I will close the case...even if he doesn't!

[ontheway]

I worked several years in a full service advertising agency. The art department was assigned the job of making one or more "graphics" on a daily basis for various clients. "We need a graphic by 4 pm for the Bass Shoe account meeting."

Countable.

[jacl]

I doesn't matter. Tell your student to put his hand down because he is wasting everyone's time.

"Yeah, well it's "graphics". Don't be so picky, Johnny. I'm the English teacher. You're the student."

[ChopChaeJoe]

graphics can be both countable or uncountable. The dictionary is simply incomplete.

[Hotpants]

[Captain Corea]

[some waygug-in]

I'm not surprised that his dictionary would say this. If it was produced in Korea, it's probably loaded with errors. The student is being a jerk, but just explain to him that Korean-English dictionaries are often wrong....as are a lot of Korean-produced English textbooks.

Often the author/authors have studied one context of a word or phrase, but have no clue about alternative contexts. So they will try to make up rules based on one example. Other times they are just too sloppy or lazy to check.

I once had a student argue with me about "according with" as opposed to "according to".

They think they know more about English than you and that's why he's doing this.

Ask to see his dictionary, see where it was published and see if you can find any other obvious errors. Sometimes there books are so bad that they will have 10 - 20 errors on one page. If you can show him that, he may not be so smug.

Good Luck