November 3rd, 2006

When I was a child, I played with those little plastic building blocks that snapped together and stayed that way through friction. They came in white, red, blue, black, yellow, grey, and sometimes green. When I first got a box of this stuff I built houses with windows and doors, stairways from the floor to my bed, and blockish little cars without wheels. Later, I built airplanes and elevated skating rinks. With upgraded building materials, I then built rocket ships and futuristic spaceships. Near the end of my building-block career I built reasonably accurate-looking helicopters, and working (with motor) tramways and trains, entire cities with rising buildings and walkways between them, and, finally, the biggest, most badass citadel and acid moat you will ever see (built from every single building block I had)—it was a goddamned work of art, I tell you.

Then, uh, I discovered hockey, high school, computers, books about space, and, later, girls. And I forget where all the building blocks went, probably sold at a garage sale for some criminally low price to a lucky neighborhood kid.

You know, of course, which building bricks I am referring to, don't you? I'm talking about Lego(TM).

Now, let's talk about that word, "Lego" for a moment, shall we? It is, or at least has become what we in the Word Nerd biz call a mass noun. A mass noun represents a class of item, usually (though certainly not always) uncountable. Here are some examples:

We don't count mass nouns. We could in some cases (like furniture, for example), but we don't. Also, when we say something like, "I drank two coffees this morning" we are just using a short-hand version of "cups of coffee", in which case it is "cups" that we are counting, not the coffee itself.

For items that we do count, we use count nouns. These are easy to spot, since we -er- count them:

So, if you didn't already know, now you see the difference between mass nouns and count nouns.

Now, as I mentioned above, "Lego" is a mass noun. It is marketed that way, it is commonly used that way, and it makes good sense that way—because it can all fit together into one continuous mass, and also because it can be added to and taken away from, like water or rice or dirt, without losing its properties.

And when I hear people using it as a count noun, "legos", it really seriously bothers me. Some might call it an irrational flare-up of emotions, but it's not unlike the irritation I used to feel when a friend ate ice cream out of a glass, or when a former -er- friend from university used to eat her muffin by picking little tiny pieces off between her thumb and forefinger, and pressing them into her mouth as though she were taking pain medication.

When I hear an adult say to a child, "aha, playing with your legos, eh?" I want to shout out, "It's 'Lego' you chowderhead! 'Lego Lego Lego'! NOT 'legos' ... that's a huge city in Africa, and the home of the 419 scam!"

I don't hear kindly-meaning at all. I hear intellectually lazy, I hear condescension, I sense generation gaps and completely non-overlapping circles of experience. I'm alone again on the short spiky carpet of childhood attempting to build the greatest creation of my short existence out of plastic while the adults of the world stomp around outside my bedroom door, oblivious to me and my efforts until they intrude with their oversimplifying misunderstanding of me. I feel alienation and true loneliness—the loneliness that you can only feel as a child when it turns out that you really do get the world as easily as you assimilated the concept of "Lego" as a mass noun. It's an alienation you feel when it turns out that the adults around you really don't notice (and couldn't appreciate if they did) that you are sharper about the world than they ... just not yet articulate enough to show them.

And I feel the dagger reminder of that whenever I hear the word "legos"—it is a reminder of how truly alone one can be.

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