I was thinking there had to be more in nautical language! “Cargo” is a mass noun and “fast” an adjective. “Abandon ship” seems like a candidate. “Above” is a preposition, so possibly this would be an instance of a different grammatical rule.
There may be specialized or obsolete usages like this, but “here is an advice” or “take advices” wouldn’t be grammatical. I mean really not grammatical, not one of those things that grammar books proscribe even though they’re in common use.
Thanks for explaining. Here it shows that English is not my native tongue.
If I may bring up another strange thing in English: The phrase “How come”. I guess it isn’t taught by teachers, and might be an US thing, perhaps?
Huh! I hadn’t realized it was a US-specific thing, but I looked it up and you’re correct. It has cognates in other Germanic languages (the Dutch phrase hoe komt het dat “how does it come that…?” became a single word hoekom “why?” in Afrikaans), and some pretty old attestations in English (in the official transcript of the 1685 trial of Titus Oates, the Lord Chief Justice asked a witness “How come you remember so particularly?”), but it seems to have fallen out of favor by the 1800s. Partridge’s slang dictionary claims it reappeared in American slang around 1848, but that 1848 attestation is in Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms, which claims it was an English phrase brought over by the original colonists (that then died out in England proper and became an Americanism).
To me, as an American, it’s just a less formal version of “why”, and I use them interchangeably except in formal writing.
It’s interesting because avis is countable without issue, and it’s not like ‘advices’ sounds wrong in English, since one can have vices. And mass nouns as a whole are just… strange.
That could be an abbreviation or mistranscription of “how come you to”, i.e. “how do you come to” without do-support. From the same speaker:
(^L. C. J.^) How come you to remember those Days of the Month?
So, if how come is an Americanism, how would one brit pick a passage that includes it?
Also, is it just me, or does everything seem to trace back to sailing in language?
Also, while unload the cargo, abandon the ship, above the deck all make sense, if a little wordy to anyone used to the short versions, I wonder if any of those expressions were shortened out of need for brevity when issuing orders on ships and the fact crews were often of mixed nationality and the shorter the commands, the less burdensome it was if an officer had to give orders in multiple languages and the less sailors would need to learn of their non-native tongue to function on ships not ran by someone of their own nationality.
I’m not sure about that. After all, we say overhead and underfoot, not over the head and under the foot.
Huh. As a middle-aged Brit, I don’t have “how come” as a US-English flavoured thing; I feel it’s well-used locally and has been all my life.
I’ve always considered “how come?” as more gentle, as in “why?” feels to me more aggressive, or confrontational. Like “why” and “how come”, I’ve found, have very very slightly different meanings in my head. I can’t describe it though…
holy crap i didnt know this thread existed let me think of some trivia
in spanish there’s a word for “but” that means “but instead”. As in “not this, but instead that.” “I don’t want milk, but instead juice.” → “No quiero leche, sino jugo”. it’s used to correct a previous statement.
this is different from “but” to add information to statement. “I want juice but I only have milk.” → “Quiero jugo pero solo tengo leche.”
There are a lot of words that were once trademarks but start being used as common nouns for a whole category of things: xerox, jello, kleenex, velcro. Some less commonly known ones that were once proprietary terms are dumpster, trampoline, and escalator. Aspirin is another interesting one; sometimes people in the US aren’t aware aspirin was a trademark but it is still trademarked by Bayer in some other countries.
The term “realtor” is used generically a lot (at least in the US) to refer to any real estate agent but its genericization is still actively being fought. The National Assocation of REALTORS® always writes REALTOR® in ALL CAPS WITH THE ® to try to maintain their specific trademark.
german does the same.
‘aber’ = ‘but’
‘sondern’ = ‘but rather’
I knew those, but I always thought that somebody said, “hey our new invention escalates people, let’s call it an Escalator!” I was surprised to find out the word “escalate” just didn’t exist until somebody said “Escalator sounds like a verb, like it escalates”
Dumpster was at least recently genericized. TiVo was really fighting against it but mostly lost relevance (I still have a TiVo). If you write “we played Scrabble” or similar in a publication you’ll get a letter from Hasbro asking you to “correct” it to “we played SCRABBLE® Brand Crossword Game”
Love how companies think their all-caps trademark overrules basic grammar.
I believe this is why the IF adaptation of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy requires you to take “a buffered analgesic” instead of “aspirin” to cure a hangover. When I first played, I was utterly flummoxed as to what this strange thing in my inventory was!
Another good one along these lines is “edit,” which didn’t exist as a verb until people decided it was what an “editor” did.
My favorite is “butle” (or “buttle” to better fit English spelling conventions) though. What else would a butler do? 
Now I wonder which came first, elevate or elevator, though I understand part of what lead to escalator being genericized fairly quickly were ads for elevators and escalators and elevator already being a generic term and the assumption that you don’t use the generic term for one product in the same sentence as the name brand of another product or something along those lines.
Also, zippers were once trademarked… And people in the twisty puzzling community have been at odds with the people who own the Rubik’s trademark for years. Most puzzling casuals see any twisty puzzle and immediately think Rubik’s cube, even when the puzzle obviously isn’t a cube or obviously has non-Rubik’s branding, but there have been times when the trademark holders have been particularly aggressive towards any product description that mentions any similarity to any Rubik’s branded puzzle. Complaints from people trying to sell their vintage puzzles on eBay that they had to avoid all the common sense key words needed to reach potential buyers beyond the hardcore puzzlers or risk having their listings flag for trademark-infringement used to be a common sight on the Twisty Puzzles Forum…
Sucks that trademark has no hard limit and the only way to legally kill a trademark is for the courts to agree that common usage reflects a trademark being generic, something unlikely to happen short of someone accused of infringement being willing to fight it in court, itself unlikely because when big corporation sends a cease and desist letter, even when the recipient is in the right, compliance is usually the only viable response because big corporation can usually bankrupt whoever they are accusing before the accused can prove their case. The 20 year duration of patents is enough to hamper the iteration most tech needs to get good, and the 95 Yyears from first publication or life of the author+70 duration of copyright is just adsurd, but that beats trademark and its in perpetuity unless the courts declare it generic BS.
TL;DR, IP OP, plz nerf.
A man walks into a pharmacist and says “Hello, do you have any of those packs of hundred-milligram acetylsalicylic acid tablets?”
The pharmacist blinks and says “You mean aspirin?”
The customer slaps his forehead and says “Ah, yes, that’s right, I can never remember what they’re called!”
“Electrocution” in Portuguese is, if you go by the dictionary, “electrocussão”. However, it should by rights be “electrocução” (read the same way). Electrocution = electricity + execution. Electrocução: electricidade + execução. There are even parallels between english and portuguese on a lot of words regarding when the portuguese word should end in “ção” and “ssão”: in english, it is equivalent to “tion” and “ssion”. Percussion; percussão. Concussion; concussão. Diction: dicção. Execution: execução.
You try actually talking about this to portuguese linguists, though, and they’ll look down at you as though you were a cockroach who dared to make a disparaging remark. If the dictionary says it’s “electrocussão”, then it’s “electrocussão” and that’s the end of discussion (discussão)! I’m convinced someone just adapted the newly-minted word, probably in a newspaper, and used whatever spelling they felt like, and it just stuck…
Similarly, the last ortographic agreement, quite apart from stupidly removing accents where they should exist (the word “pára”=stop and the word “para”=to are now written the same way, but still not pronounced the same way), it removed silent consonants whose purpose was to open the sound of the preceding vowel… and then didn’t compensate appropriately by adding accents. So the word “recepção” (reception, and the second “e” is an open sound) is now written “receção”; if it were written “recéção” it would still be clear, but since it does not have that accent, unless you know how it’s supposed to be pronounced (I believe linguistics gatekeeping is an atrocity) you might just pronounce it the same as “recessão”, which means recession. Similarly, “espectáculo” (spectacle, show) lost its silent “c” before the “t”. It’s still pronounced “esPÉtáculo”, but it’s now written “espetáculo”, which looks as though it comes from the verb “espetar”, which means to spit/skewer. So for “espectadores” = spectators , where it was pronounced “esPEctadores”, it is now written “espetadores”; and by our reading rules, this last word should the pronounced as “espetaDOres”, i.e., “those who skewer”.
It’s ridiculous. 
I personally refuse to write in this manner. Many authors have made the same choice. But obviously kids who have learned from this travesty will keep using it, and replace the old guard. And you end up with stupid, unnecessary irregularities. In time, even Portuguese people will not be sure how to pronounce those words. And as often ends up happening, the written word will end up influencing the spoken word by its ambiguity, instead of being a faithful record.
***
On another note, if this is a thread for linguists, you probably all already know the poem The Chaos, but hey, I’ma gonna link it anyway.
On a note so completely unrelated that it belongs on a new post, it fascinates me to see little ways in which language may expose small cultural differences. My favourite example: in portuguese we primarily apologise with “desculpe”, or “peço desculpa”. Literally, we are asking the person with whom we are speaking to “exculpate” us; to remove the guilt from us; “unguilt me”. It’s a request. I have wronged; I am actively asking you to remove the guilt from what I did.
In english, however, although it’s possible to say “forgive me”, “I’m sorry” is pretty much the go-to. And “I’m sorry” mean “I regret this”; but it ends there, it requires nothing from the person with whom we are speaking. It is a declaration of how we feel.
There are other things, plenty of them, but I don’t happen to remember them right now. But I find it amusing how “adeus”, “addio”, “adieu”, etc, all come from “A Deus”, “A Dio”, “A Dieu”; “To God”. As in, “I commend your soul to God”, “may God care for you”, etc, as a means of saying goodbye.
EDIT - My favourite word in the whole wide world is “okaerinasai”, or “okaeri”, and sorry for the romaji but my kanji/hiragana is nonexistent.
Ok, just a random tidbit, but I’ve always found right and left weird. Like, in english you have “My right” and “I have the right to…”, right? (Heh.)
Not the same in spanish, because the former is “derecha” and the latter is “derecho”, which can also mean straight. But to me it seems like it comes from the same root, no? Which I always thought was atrange that despite the two languages sounding very different there, they have that connection.
(I was going to mention ‘sinistra’ but it looks like I was wrong…)