Conversation

Pierce Darragh 🍴🥄 | 🦆
@pl_pierce
🤔 this is interesting. in my K-12, you got assigned "homework" and it was a mass noun, eg, "how much homework". in college, it suddenly became a count noun: "how many homeworks". always thought this was odd.
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Pierce Darragh 🍴🥄 | 🦆
@pl_pierce
I could imagine "consult my prior work" or "consult my prior works" are both acceptable, and neither feels as marked to me as "homeworks" did when I started college. but "prior works" somehow feels grandiose. Michelangelo had "works", you know? but are these not similar? hm. 🤔
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aaron
@aatxe
imo prior works is like the specific concrete works from the past whereas prior work is the collective body of past work, and indeed calling anything a work in the sense of "many works" carries some implication of profundity
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