My 7 year old cousin LOVES these. Every Sunday morning she gets to help dad make pancakes for the family.
It's pancakes. In a can. It's made $15 million.
21–30 of 58 posts
Re: It's pancakes. In a can. It's made $15 million.
#22I wish I could take the guy who came up with the headline to task! We've had a headline homicide... 1) "it is pancakes" isn't a sentence (ambiguous in the extreme). 2) The words "[it is] pancakes" are incompatible because "are" is the plural equivalent of "is". 3) "in a can" is not a sentence (lack of a subject & verb). 4) "it's made" is "it is made" not the "it has made" it should be. (It's as "it has" is not an off…
That's a reductio ad absurdum, since (begging your pardon) your revised headline sounds bad and lacks punch. Meanwhile the original headline qua headline seems fine. Headlines are their own specialized context with their own rules, somewhat different from the main rules. You might even say they have a domain-specific grammar. I'm upvoting your comment anyway because the concept of a subgrammar never occurred to me be…
It's true that news headlines obey their own little grammatical rules. Language Log (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/) has mentioned this a number of times. Tho noone in the field really cares about it, because its not all the relevant to language on the whole.
Re: It's pancakes. In a can. It's made $15 million.
#23I wish I could take the guy who came up with the headline to task! We've had a headline homicide... 1) "it is pancakes" isn't a sentence (ambiguous in the extreme). 2) The words "[it is] pancakes" are incompatible because "are" is the plural equivalent of "is". 3) "in a can" is not a sentence (lack of a subject & verb). 4) "it's made" is "it is made" not the "it has made" it should be. (It's as "it has" is not an off…
I like how you call yourself a grammar nazi, cite the old (and wrong) definition of a sentence as something with a subject and verb, but then say that "it is pancakes" is not a sentence. Why not? It's got a subject -- it -- and it's got a verb -- is. Further, English has subject-verb agreement not subject-object agreement or verb-object agreement, hence "it is pancakes" is completely fine. Sure there maybe be some se…
You're awesome and I'm looking forward to everything else you might write about linguistics on HN, but I'm not going to be the only person on Hacker News to tell you not to call people "idiots" on our comment threads.
Re: It's pancakes. In a can. It's made $15 million.
#24Something is wrong with a society that needs shortcuts to make pancake batter. It takes less than 5 minutes --- and even less time if you take just a few minutes to premix the dry ingredients ahead of time.
I 100% believe this product adds value to people's lives, but I'm also pretty confident that that's because people are terrified to learn how to cook.
Re: It's pancakes. In a can. It's made $15 million.
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Likely not. Just like we don't get/want spray cheese. All sounds a bit yuck to me. I get the powder stuff. You can buy it from Tesco. Comes in a bottle, which is about 1/4 full of powder. You can store in the cupboard for ages. When you want pancakes you just open the bottle, fill it up with fresh milk, shake for ages then start cooking. Really tasty as well.
I don't think anybody wants spray cheese...
Give spray cheese a chance. Put it on a hot dog !
Re: It's pancakes. In a can. It's made $15 million.
#26Produces too much waste and it doesn't take that long to mix the batter yourself.
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Re: It's pancakes. In a can. It's made $15 million.
#27Something is wrong with a society that needs shortcuts to make pancake batter. It takes less than 5 minutes --- and even less time if you take just a few minutes to premix the dry ingredients ahead of time. I 100% believe this product adds value to people's lives, but I'm also pretty confident that that's because people are terrified to learn how to cook.
If you read the article, you notice that the inventor claims that it's not something he'd use himself, but as a "low brow" product especially marketed towards children. A little kid would be more entertained by the notion of "spraying" food rather than go through the hassle of measuring ingredients and cleaning up the mixing bowls, etc.
Re: It's pancakes. In a can. It's made $15 million.
#28Something is wrong with a society that needs shortcuts to make pancake batter. It takes less than 5 minutes --- and even less time if you take just a few minutes to premix the dry ingredients ahead of time. I 100% believe this product adds value to people's lives, but I'm also pretty confident that that's because people are terrified to learn how to cook.
I think it's a fantastic case-in-point about how much value people place on convenience over quality.
Also, it is impossible to overstate the importance of not making people think. Making pancake batter requires either remembering the recipe, or (gasp!) looking it up. With this product, all you have to know is that when you push the nozzle, shitty pancakes come out. Magic!
Re: It's pancakes. In a can. It's made $15 million.
#29I wish I could take the guy who came up with the headline to task! We've had a headline homicide... 1) "it is pancakes" isn't a sentence (ambiguous in the extreme). 2) The words "[it is] pancakes" are incompatible because "are" is the plural equivalent of "is". 3) "in a can" is not a sentence (lack of a subject & verb). 4) "it's made" is "it is made" not the "it has made" it should be. (It's as "it has" is not an off…
To CNN: Remember, it's my language you're abusing.
No, it is not. It's their language too. There is no central authority which hands down the rules of the English language, only common agreement and a shared understanding. If a collection of words and punctuation has clearly expressed an idea, then it has served its purpose.
Rules of grammar are useful, but getting too pedantic and authoritarian about them can do nothing but suck the joy out of your life.
Re: It's pancakes. In a can. It's made $15 million.
#30I wish I could take the guy who came up with the headline to task! We've had a headline homicide... 1) "it is pancakes" isn't a sentence (ambiguous in the extreme). 2) The words "[it is] pancakes" are incompatible because "are" is the plural equivalent of "is". 3) "in a can" is not a sentence (lack of a subject & verb). 4) "it's made" is "it is made" not the "it has made" it should be. (It's as "it has" is not an off…
>The unmurdered headline would be,− > It's pancakes in a can, and it has made $15 million. How does this address #2: The words "[it is] pancakes" are incompatible because "are" is the plural equivalent of "is".
The words "[it is] pancakes" are incompatible because "are" is the plural equivalent of "is".
Not true. "It is pancakes in a can" is entirely grammatically correct, because "pancakes in a can" is a singular noun -- an idiomatic one, to be sure, but "pancakes in a can" is taken to mean "a can containing pancakes", which is obviously singular.