You Know What Really Grinds My Gears? (Part Deux)
People who refer to a Mac, or a collection of Macs as just ‘Mac’. I mean.. that’s not even grammatically correct.
Let me elaborate for those who seem a little confused here. I just read a comment in which the author had written: “Mac blows”. What they should have written is: “Macs blow”.
The problem here is ignorance. Either that, or just being uneducated. People don’t seem to understand that ‘Mac’ is short for ‘Macintosh’ and is used to refer to a singular product, not the company name or a collective noun. They believe that ‘Mac’ (in their understanding) is the Operating System. They’re half way there in that belief, the actual name is ‘Mac OS X’. It doesn’t work on it’s own. ‘Mac’ is the hardware, ‘Mac OS’ is the Operating System name, ‘X’ is the version (in this case, X is the Roman numeral for 10). I’ll accept that ‘Mac OS X’ can be a mouthful, and I accept that many people, including Apple shorten it down to just ‘OS X’. But you need to remember that if you drop the ‘X’ in an effort to refer to all versions collectively, you can’t just say ‘OS’… You’d have to use ‘Mac OS’.
I digress…
Anyway, you wouldn’t say “Book is boring” would you? No, you’d say “Books are boring”. Because ‘book’ is not a collective noun like ’sheep’ or ‘fish’. If someone wrote “Sheep blows”, one would notice a problem. Is the author referring to a particular sheep?
So take note now. When you refer to a Mac, don’t forget that it is a single entity. If you want to refer to more than one, or the entire range as a whole, you can just add the ’s’ like you do with other nouns to create the plural. Like this: “I am referring to many Macs”.
If I hear anymore “Mac is gay”, “X or Y doesn’t work on Mac”, “Mac doesn’t support X or Y”, I’ll be a little annoyed. Be more specific, “OS X doesn’t support X or Y”, “Macs are gay”, “X or Y doesn’t work on OS X”. Those are correct methods of your slander.
