Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/29/how-to-build-your-own-working.html
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Not quite sure I’d like the sustain of that guitar. I’d also quite likely not enjoy tuning it - but at least you can smash it if you’re getting sick of it. Again and again…
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I do have a Pedant Pendant, though I don’t exhibit it in public, so I’ll say this once, having manfully resisted saying it for a couple of years now…
The plural of LEGO is LEGO.
ETA (because I’m not allowed to post a new reply/two replies in a row - I guess Disqus thinks I might be spam)
Well, that’s appropriate.
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Thick as a brick? Another brick in the wall?
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Chuck Norris would make the fingerboard out of Lego too, and use the little Lego bumps as frets.
That side of this argument is doomed to extinction.
And yes, I usually care about language quite a bit myself, to a pedantic degree (about some things), but being a brand name makes “Lego” a lower order of word. The fact that Lego marketing issued a release asking people not to pluralize that way constitutes a reason to do so.
(Note: I’m a Canadian who grew up without the American-style pluralization, thought it sounded kind of odd when I first heard “Legos,” didn’t think much about it for years, but decided which side to take the first time I encountered a tirade against it. It’s a brand name, a corporate property. Let those paid to do so battle over its usage, save your efforts for words and parts of language that need and deserve it.)
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Depends where you live. I am in UK and had NEVER heard anyone say “Legos” until I found it here on BB many, many years ago. So I’m not just parroting some corporate line, far from it - what you fail to understand is just how wrong, how grating, how ugly it sounds to a British English speaker. As bad as someone always saying sheeps.
And I am not sure why and where you get the idea that brand names are lower orders of words merely by virtue of being brand names. For decades everyone just said Lego - it was only in much more recent times when Legos became used in the USA that LEGO made the formal statement, and just because they did is not a reason to be deliberately perverse about it and determine that therefore one MUST do the opposite.
Equally, we Brits find many other American pluralisations just weird. It’s like they cannot talk about anything in the singular.
It’s sport, not sports.
It’s folk, not folks
It’s anyway, not anyways (this one, especially, grates - the other two can sort of be held to make some sense in many contexts if one squints through a grammatical lens at a very obtuse angle, but anyways makes no sense at all, ever)
Do Americans play with Meccanos or Duplos or Playmobils?
You may think the argument cannot be won, but as an argument it is far from doomed to extinction.
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I’ll concede folk vs. folks, but not sport when there are many types of sports.
Also, I don’t get maths vs. mathematics. We have no plural for math - “I have a math class” “I have math for sixth period” although we usually get more specific (i.e., trig, algebra, calculus).
We (UK) say maths because it is a contraction of mathematics.
We just don’t say math.
Sports is ok when talking about plural individual sports. "Basketball and netball are both sports where one handles the ball’ and ‘The Olympic Games encompasses many different sports’ but not when talking about sport generically. ‘Sport is riddled with drug-taking to enhance performance despite plenty of drug testing’. ‘Not enough people go to watch live sport these days’
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I get why “maths” but it just sounds off in my non-British brain (as Legos sounds off for you). As for the drug testing in sport or watching sport, nope. 
Well, you’re just a bad sport, then. 
PS would you really say ‘Sports is riddled…’ ? No. If you say ‘Sports ARE riddled…’ to make the verb agree, then I’d say ‘Which sports?’, whereas if you say ‘Sport is riddled…’ well that is clearly a generic statement.
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Yes! That works! 
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And then there’s the Aussie sport. As in, ‘Tie me kangaroo down, sport’.
(Hope you caught my PS above.)
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I imagine that a misplaced verb agreement is the easiest way to tell if someone is really American.
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Well, lots of verbs don’t agree with Americans, that’s why they nounise them so much and verbise so many nouns.
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Only North Americans say “Legos” so not really doomed. My advice is to ignore it, and my advices.
Thanks for your adviserations. I have ignorated them.
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Where did you miss the part where I said that I wasn’t American and that “Legos” was no more native to my experience?
I have also been told, repeatedly, “how grating, how ugly it sounds to a British English speaker,” and, well, I just don’t care. It’s not as bad as someone saying “sheeps” because the pluralization of sheep is centuries or more old and feels right, whereas Lego is a 20th century product name, and thus doesn’t matter that much.
“just because they did is not a reason to be deliberately perverse about it and determine that therefore one MUST do the opposite.”
Sure it is, due to the fact that the statement came from someone in their marketing department.
Edit: but seriously, I’m not entirely joking on that one, because we know for a fact that they’re not making such a statement because they give the slightest shit about language, but to keep their branding straight.
“Anyways” does sound dumb, but again, proper word.
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