Chest_Rockfield wrote:
Grävling wrote:And restaurantowners are quick to tell you that they server many beverages -- but not that they serve many foods.
Go to the Cheesecake Factory

The wider selection the restaurant has, the more likely they will say " many foods" over "food".
Can you give me a reference for this? Up until this post I was willing to go on record as saying that no restaurant in the English speaking world used 'foods' this way -- unless, of course, they were run by immigrants who were busy transliterating how this is said in their native language. This error is definitely on the list of common things that English-as-a-Second-Language teachers are trained to watch for, and correct in their students.
If this usage is now being adopted by native English speakers, it will be interesting to watch and track it. And professionally, it is something I need to pay attention to.
Chest_Rockfield wrote:
Grävling wrote:They never say 'a wide selection of beverage'.
That may be true, but...
Grävling wrote:the fact remains that actual English speaking restaurant hosts and hostesses talk about having 'a wide selection of food and beverages'
is not necessarily true. I believe this could easily and maybe even more appropriately be said, "a wide selection of food and beverage". (Unless it were said, "We have a wide selection of food and many beverages.")
Regardless, the fact that we can't even agree means that the verbiage is really of no consequence provided it is spelled and punctuated correctly, yes?
I disagree. I don't think that 'a wide selection of beverage' is in use. And after googling for the exact phrase, and reading what I found for over half an hour, I only found the phrase used where 'beverage' is the first part of a compound plural noun --in constructions such as 'a wide selection of beverage items'. -- with 2 exceptions, both of which occur in the english translations of pages originally written in Croatian. Here I think the translator goofed. But since Croatian is not one of the languages I speak, I cannot judge whether in Croatian, the word that they are translating as 'beverage' is a collective noun. This is the usual source for such errors.
And this is important, because in English (but not many other languages), you need to put a plural, or a collective noun after the phrase 'a selection of'. Thus 'a selection of jewellery' (which Americans spell 'jewelry') is ok. If the phrase 'a selection of beverage' is in the transitional stage between being perceived as an error, to being perceived as an acceptable usage, it would argue that the word 'beverage' is becoming a collective noun, like 'jewellery'.
So I think what we have found is that you are much more tolerant than I am when it comes to English usage. The things that irritate me and strike me as sloppy, or incorrect, and detract from my enjoyment and my ability to immerse myself in a world strike you as 'of no consequence' -- or more likely do not strike you at all, until somebody points them out to you.
Now it may be that I am a bit over-sensitive to this, since translating from other languages into English is what I mostly do these days, and my job is not to just make sure that the meaning comes through, but to convey every
nuance in the original, when possible. But since the object of the exercise is the enjoyment of the game players,
then one needs to consider the needs of the most sensitive, rather than the least.
So do you find 'We have a wide selection of food and beverages' jarring? And would prefer 'We have a wide selection of foods and beverages'? Given that the result is a list of foods and beverages, I find that passable, though I would write 'food and beverages', trying to capture the 'restaurant' experience and not the 'warehouse' or 'supermarket' experience, for all that. But there is no way that 'a wide selection of <singular concrete noun> and <singular concrete noun>' will not jar with me.
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Buceth: They claim that they keep the land safe of wrongdoers and evil creatures.
Try: They claim that they keep the land safe from wrongdoers and evil creatures.
By the way, given that the game often makes a distinction between telling the truth and lying, this conversation really should be rewritten so that you have the option to lie to Buceth, first about what you would do in his hypothetical case, and most importantly when you state that you are ready to be a follower of the Shadow, when actually you are a true Feygard loyalist.