Timeline for Do Americans drop the 'a' as in 'that's good time'?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| May 6, 2017 at 19:22 | comment | added | Jim | @FumbleFingers - I agree, they are both idiomatic and are practically interchangeable but one comments on a particular income as being high and the other on that income as being in the upper echelons. I guess it’s a very subtle distinction. | |
| May 6, 2017 at 18:01 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | ...consider Does he really earn £5000 a week? Now that's what I call [a] high income! With or without the article ("noun" or "adjective", if you will), both versions seem perfectly idiomatic to me. | |
| May 6, 2017 at 17:56 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Jim: I don't see any difference in meaning as such in OP's exact context, though you might be able to differentiate, for example, That's [a] good play! With the article that would have to refer to a single coherent set of actions within a game, of relatively short duration in total (where without the article it might feasibly even refer to an entire lengthy game, from start to finish). But to my mind there's room for a lot of flexibility as regards the exact syntax role of X in statements of the general form That's X (X=noun, adjective, whatever). | |
| May 6, 2017 at 17:31 | comment | added | Jim | @FumbleFingers - I think of the two differently. In the same way that “He makes good money” is fundamentally different than “he makes a good salary”. I can’t add an ’a’: “he makes a good money” So even though it works with or without- thus switching between the two meanings, if the first was meant, the ’a’ wasn’t dropped. | |
| May 6, 2017 at 16:57 | answer | added | Colin Fine | timeline score: 5 | |
| May 6, 2017 at 16:54 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | @Jim: I'm with Peter on this one. Same as That's [an] unhealthy food or Last year we had [a] below-average rainfall, which to my BrE ear sound syntactically credible with or without the article. | |
| May 6, 2017 at 16:51 | comment | added | Jim | What @Peter Shor said. But note that the a wasn’t dropped. Rather it wasn’t ever there to begin with. | |
| May 6, 2017 at 16:47 | comment | added | Peter Shor | We can drop the indefinite article in "that's good time" because time can be an uncountable noun in that sentence. We don't drop the indefinite article in, for example, "I had a good time" because time is countable in that sentence. | |
| May 6, 2017 at 16:43 | review | First posts | |||
| May 7, 2017 at 0:04 | |||||
| May 6, 2017 at 16:39 | history | asked | DanielP | CC BY-SA 3.0 |