[Artemisia] Using adjectives as nouns

[Stephanae Baker]

On Aug 10, 2007, at 10:23 PM, Megen/Phoebe wrote:
>   It's like calling adults "fats" or "olds".
>



Actually, this brings up an interesting point, which is that I think  
we've been asking ourselves the wrong question linguistically in the  
case of "smalls." It's really more about the grammatical practice of  
using adjectives as nouns than it is about any one adjective. I would  
theorize that in Middle English, it was simply a common practice to  
use adjectives as nouns, just as I know they still do in languages  
like French and Spanish, and to make them agree in number and gender  
with the group of objects being referred to this way. In English,  
this practice has become much less common and the idea of gender/ 
number agreement has disappeared from it entirely. However, we still  
use it in come cases, such as the following:

The old
The sick
The dead
The poor

And it is especially common when referring to nationalities of people:

The French
The Japanese
The Italians (here, for some reason, it has even kept its number  
agreement)

There is evidence that even as little as 300 years ago, this practice  
was even more common in English:

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be  
free."

Most often, today, we add the word "one" after the adjective:

"Which apple do you want?"
"The small one."

In most romance languages, they do not do this:

"Quel pomme voulez-vous?"
"Le petit."

Number and gender agreement make the practice more versatile, but we  
don't have that option:

"Les français" translates nicely to "The French."
To translate "Les françaises" properly, we have to say "French  
women," "la française" is "The french woman," and "le français" is  
"the French man."

The result of this line of thought for me is that I am going to have  
to backtrack on my opinion. "Smalls" comes from a period grammatical  
practice that has not evolved entirely out of our language. We have a  
grammatical equivalent (the small ones), which I will have to use  
over "smalls" if I ever want to refer to a group of small things  
because I'm compulsively grammatical.

Disclaimer: This was an entirely theoretical argument about English  
language and grammar and should in no way be read as an opinion about  
what anyone should or should not say.

Belladonna