[Accipender]

(2011.May.17 08:12 PM)InPaceRequiscat Wrote:  

(2011.May.16 11:09 AM)Troopermccue Wrote:  "toni decided to smoke some shards of meth before his rabbit hunting excursion."

seems to work as a plural. he didn't smoke only one shard of methamphetamine, he crushed them up and smoked numerous bowls so that he could hunt for rabbits all night long. i can see why you would say that selling "them" doesn't work, but i believe it does just fine. think of it as you are cutting the meth into baggies of 1oz portions, you would sell your dealer 10 bags of meth @ 1oz per bag. therefore, you are selling "them" to your dealer so that your dealer can get them into the right hands to be smoked, ingested, or sniffed.

Wouldn't meth be singular in all those given examples? The modifying nouns (acci feel free to correct me) are the plural, but meth is not. You have meth. You have a large quantity of meth. But as soon as you call them shards, it is the type of meth you have that is singular, regardless of how many of that type you have.

However, I don't know how that would work if you were to say you had 3 rocks and 2 shards of meth.

Acci? Am I stumbling in the dark here or do I have some relevant point you can help bring to light?

You have the right idea, but are not articulating it superbly. Generally, "meth" is a collective singular noun. Like any other collective singular noun, it can be 'partitioned' into a variety of subsets, as you noted.

The other issue that I just realized is that "meth" is an abbreviation for "methamphetamine". Since you rarely have a (single) methamphetamine, it would explain the tendency to be a collective noun, as the actual would be "I have methamphetamines".