Grammar Girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're going to talk about the different ways you can count bacon, and then we'll look at what's interesting about the Martha's Vineyard accent.

Grammar Girl listener Kyle sent me this adorably meaty question. He writes,

This morning my three-year-old told me he wanted a million bacon's, which led to a discussion

with my six-year-old about bites of bacon versus pieces of bacon. It led me down a rabbit hole

of seeing if bacon can be pluralized, and I'm finding mixed results.

Can you please weigh in on whether or not it's possible to have a million bacon's?

Well, first of all, shout out to Kyle's kids for bringing some sizzling linguistic curiosity to the breakfast table.

A million bacon's might not be standard English, but it is a delightful phrase,

not to mention a tantalizing visual for bacon lovers to imagine. It also raises a question,

can bacon be plural? Well, to answer that, we need to get a little nerdy and dig into the

difference between countable and uncountable nouns.

Let's start with the basics.

Countable nouns are nouns you can add a number in front of, or that work with words like

many, few, several, or a couple of.

Let's look at Bacon's favorite companion, eggs.

You can say he ate an egg with his breakfast. In that case,

egg is singular. He ate one egg. Or you can say, I'd like two eggs and toast, because eggs can be

made plural by adding an S. It's a countable noun. Now compare that to butter. You wouldn't say, I'll have two butters. You'd say

some butter, a bit of butter, or maybe a pat of butter. That makes better an uncountable noun,

something we talk about in terms of quantity or portion, not individual units. And this is where English loves to play tricks on us.

Some uncountable nouns feel like they should be countable, but they're not. For example,

you don't say, she gave me good advices. You say she gave me good advice. You don't have

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