A Whole Bunch of Vote

November 6, 2020 2:03 PM

When did the word ‘vote’ represent both the singular and the plural? Legit English usage or wonk-ese?

After watching hours of election coverage on MSNBC, I kept being distracted by the anchors and interviewees referring to multiple votes using the singular word “vote”. As in “we expect a new batch of vote to be coming in” or “the amount of vote is not enough to call the state.”

This is really a common usage of the word or are the wonk political class continuing their butchering of the English language?

posted by thejrt to Writing & Language (6 answers total)

A bunch of linguists noticed this in 2012; the term you're looking for is "mass noun". This is a noun that refers to a, well, mass of a substance. Water, blood, oil, hair, beer, etc. are all mass nouns. There are also count nouns like cat, table, pan, banana, etc., that are countable.

You can force count nouns to act as mass nouns ("There's a lot of banana in this smoothie") and the reading is something like "x stuff". You can also do the reverse- "I drank a lot of beers" and the reading is either "quantities of X" or "types of x".
posted by damayanti at 2:20 PM on November 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

Best answer: A bunch of linguists noticed this in 2012; the term you're looking for is "mass noun".

The mass noun aspect is old. What seems new and jarring is, as Language Log points out, the "anarthrous" (article-less) usage and usage without a specifying adjective.

Legit English usage or wonk-ese?

I (ahem) vote for wonk-ese. The OED entry for vote doesn't have examples of either of these usages despite having been fully revised for the 3rd edition in June 2020.
posted by jedicus at 2:33 PM on November 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

I’m familiar with the mass noun when it’s preceded by a modifier, generally referring to a bloc: the black vote, the soccer mom vote, etc. I don’t like the two examples you provided, though. Legit usage? Yes, you understand what they’re communicating. I just think it sounds bad.
posted by kevinbelt at 2:45 PM on November 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

Yeah, the mass usage to signify a bloc ("Get out the vote") seems kind of like a bridge to this new usage, which does feel wonky in that I've never seen anyone use it IRL.
posted by trig at 2:51 PM on November 6, 2020 [2 favorites]

As an unapologetic descriptivist: this newer usage is niche and wonky. But also acceptable in a broad sense, insofar as it reads as intelligible/grammatical as kevinbelt suggests.

It would not be allowed in anything I have a say in writing. It has nothing to offer and a lot of coy, distracting posturing, compared to the obvious simple plural form "a new batch of votes".
posted by SaltySalticid at 5:24 PM on November 6, 2020 [1 favorite]

"Batch of vote" looks to me to be a close parallel to "monthly spend" in that it's a jarring, trendy, pointless, pretentious, and completely uncalled-for wedging of insider jargon into English as she is generally spoke; in other words, business as usual and nothing to get hung about.
posted by flabdablet at 3:47 AM on November 7, 2020 [2 favorites]