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Hi. Just a quick question. My school is busy making its new entrance exams for next year. A teacher asked my if these passages are correct.

'This graph shows annual consumption of foods per head in Japan. Crops consumption became lower and lower year by year. But meats consumption became higher and higher.

In 1968 there was a difference of 124.3 kg between then, 40 years later that became 63 kg. The highest consumption of milk and dairy products was in 1998.'

First I told the teacher that less should be in place of lower and more in place of higher. I told him that it should be 'Crop consumption' not 'Crops consumption. The same with meats.

He asked me why 'milk and dairy products' was OK if 'Meats' and 'Crops' weren't.

It is a bit embarrassing but I am at a bit of a loss to explain it to him. Any help you would like to offer is most welcome!

'Foods' is OK because the graph is being viewed as about different types of food; then, an analogy could be made with 'foodstuffs' (food+s, food-stuff+s).

'Foodstuffs' is actually also pretty helpful in considering why 'crops consumption' and 'meats consumption' are wrong - compare

foodstuff / crop consumption
foodstuffs / ?crop consumptions
*foodsstuff / *crops consumption (see footnote 1)
*foodsstuffs / *crops consumptions (see footnote 2)

Don't let the space versus lack of a space distract you, and don't whatever you do get drawn into debate about examples like passersby versus ?/*passerbys!

Note that if you were to read out the incorrectly written foodstuff examples, the errors would be hard if not impossible for the listener to detect. But since we are presumably talking about student reading rather than listening ability here, it will behove the exam writer to get things right with regard to the printed text! (And I'd still object to mistakes even if they were in a text to be read out and recorded, that I could correct in the process of doing that recording!).

Still, if the exam writer/teacher is admamant that the s must stay on the crops and meats (ooh, not compounds! Did the teacher realize this when he asked "why products but not crops and meats" - but see next paragraph for actual discussion of this point), you could nonchalantly suggest that he consider adding the definite article before each of those words, a genitive immediately after it, and a by-phrase (for clear agency - I mean, it's not like the crops are consuming themselves or something else [people?]...is it?): the crop's/crops' consumption by people.

As for 'milk and dairy products' versus implicitly 'milk and dairy product', try this one:

big and small person
big and small people

But seriously, if the goalposts shift yet again and it becomes an interrogation over just 'dairy products' versus 'dairy product', well, there is then always the option (or not(?)) of adding a tiny little 'a' to the latter - I mean, this is English 101, for pity's sake!


(1) As in, "That's the dog's/dogs' food, so don't let the cat have it" - NOT!
(2) Unless you are named Crop, with a company called Crop's Productions or something.

Nouns being adjectives aren't plural: Ten pound note, three mile walk, crop consumption, meat consumption.

JuanTwoThree wrote:Nouns being adjectives aren't plural: Ten pound note, three mile walk, crop consumption, meat consumption.

JuanTwoThree, thanks. Must have been brain dead not to have picked that out yesterday.

Michael

That's certainly a very succinct way of putting it, so I also want to say thanks, JTT!

I guess I've always preferred to "not worry" too much about exactly what the first component of a compound is in terms of "its" part of speech ('Er, it's part of a compound noun'), hence my trying to suggest that an ultimate lack of space (certainly in any "fully fused" compound i.e. without even a hyphen intervening between and linking together the parts, which I've taken as the/my prototypical compound, as it seems to be the eventual end point in the compounding process) leaves nowhere else for the plural -s to go than the end of the printed compound.

But I did nevertheless get a bit too carried away with thinking about spoken versus read food(*s)stuffs, dogs (dog's, dogs'?) food/dinners, and product "versus" products, when the answer could've been phrased a lot more succinctly! So again, thanks JTT!