alt Hacker NewsHow exciting, I get to be the pedant: it’s “stream-of-consciousness,” not “stream-of-conscious.” Conscious is an adjective; there can’t be a stream of it.
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rendall • today at 7:46 AM
I see your pedantry, and raise it one more!
Through substantivization one can definitely have stream-of-<adjective>. Think "a stream of blue" or "a stream of the poor".
People often shave off the tail of well-known expressions:
“same difference” → “same diff”
“no big deal” → “no big”
“It’s no big.”
“fair enough” → “fair”
“Fair.”
“good enough” → “good enough” → “good”
“Yeah, that’s good.” (implies good enough)
“I don’t know” → “dunno”
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globular-toast • today at 6:45 AM
This is how British people feel every time we read "full-featured".
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efilife • today at 5:18 AM
I think the same when I see "your subconscious". No, it should be "your subconsciousness"
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On the other hand English is highly imbued with lake of morphological inflection and other explicit lexicalization by grammatical type. So this is really just following the main stream tendency.