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one more for UK grammar mavens: "soft drinks bottles"?

one more for UK grammar mavens: "soft drinks bottles"?

one more for UK grammar mavens: "soft drinks bottles"?

(OP)
I'd say "soft drink bottles".  Google gives me twice as many hits on "soft drink bottles UK" as "soft drinks bottles UK", but is "soft drinks bottles" incorrect in the UK?  (It's definitely incorrect in the US.)

That's it for this series of questions; I'm done with the paper.

Hg

RE: one more for UK grammar mavens: "soft drinks bottles"?

"soft drink" is an adjectival phrase describing the noun "bottles". It doesn't matter in English whether the noun is singular or plural, the adjective does not change.

Jeff

RE: one more for UK grammar mavens: "soft drinks bottles"?

Soft drink bottles seems to work best on the basis that soft drink is a broad term and can mean singular as well as plural.  Soft drinks bottles contains a double plural which does not make sense.
Also, Soft drinks bottles could conceivably refer to someone called Soft hence the nonsense sentence:  "Soft drinks bottles". The same can not be applied to Soft drink bottles unless a comma is added after Soft which would then lead to the nonsense instruction: "Soft, drink bottles"

RE: one more for UK grammar mavens: "soft drinks bottles"?

Perhaps if you had some Coke bottles and some 7-Up bottles, the adjectival phrase would need to indicate that there was more than one type of soft drink being referred to.

But I doubt it.

Jeff

RE: one more for UK grammar mavens: "soft drinks bottles"?

Have you tried putting "" around "soft drink bottles" and "soft drinks bottles"?

In this case you will see that theres 12300 hits for the first but only 655 for the latter.

Best regards

Morten

RE: one more for UK grammar mavens: "soft drinks bottles"?

"bottles for soft drinks"

RE: one more for UK grammar mavens: "soft drinks bottles"?

Why can't the **** English use cans anyway ?? The problem would go away and then we could get down to some serious work in this forum !!

RE: one more for UK grammar mavens: "soft drinks bottles"?

Yates: When you say the "English", are you referring to England or USA? You can see how any wording can be read in many different ways.

RE: one more for UK grammar mavens: "soft drinks bottles"?

yates
If you really wanted to "get down to some serious work in this forum" you wouldn't be reading & replying to this post!

Besides we are still looking for some Aluminum to make them with, but all we can find is Aluminium

from (the City of) Barrie, Ontario.

I tried sniffing Coke once, but the ice cubes got stuck in my nose

RE: one more for UK grammar mavens: "soft drinks bottles"?

I would consider 'soft drink bottles' is more correct but either seems to be acceptable. Yet again, the Americans are showing us Brits how it should be done.

What do we call the industry that makes soft drinks? Soft drink industry or soft drinks industry? In UK, the latter sounds better (to me, at least).

John

RE: one more for UK grammar mavens: "soft drinks bottles"?

Here in NE Ohio it's "pop bottles" and I thought that most of the rest of the US uses "soda bottles". It's very rare that I hear the term soft drink.

RE: one more for UK grammar mavens: "soft drinks bottles"?

"soft drink" is any non-alcholic beverage.

"soda" is always carbonated.

"pop" may be either, depending on regional usage.

RE: one more for UK grammar mavens: "soft drinks bottles"?

Isn't a bit like "trades unions" versus "trade unions"?  One is a number of unions each representing mofre than one trade, the other is a number of unions each representing only one trade.

For soft drinks, "soft drinks bottles" is a number of collections of bottles, each collection representing a different soft drink, but "soft drink bottles" could be exactly the same thing, or it could be a collection of bottles used only for one type of soft drink.  Depends on how ambiguous you want to be!

Bung
Life is non-linear...

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