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I know news doesn't have a plural, but what is correct in the following example:

We must recognize real news from fake one.

or

We must recognize real news from fake ones.

Thank you in advance

kalu
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    Related https://ell.stackexchange.com/q/68501/9161 – ColleenV Jan 30 '19 at 17:26
  • @ColleenV: Nicely found. It's nowhere near a "duplicate", imho, but definitely extremely relevant. – FumbleFingers Jan 30 '19 at 17:38
  • @FumbleFingers Definitely not a duplicate, but I wanted to link it just in case someone with the other question found this discussion first. I wish there was a way to see the “related links” section of the sidebar in the mobile view. – ColleenV Jan 31 '19 at 15:20
  • @ColleenV: Oh! I've only just noticed that Linked 4 News for plural on the sidebar (I'm on a PC desktop). I always assumed the Related list was just based on an automated search for earlier posts having many words / text sequences in common with the current one. I didn't even realise there was such a thing as Linked (which I assume arises purely because *you* put that link in your comment - or is it a "mod thing" that you can explicitly set the sidebar notification?). – FumbleFingers Jan 31 '19 at 15:52
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    @FumbleFingers Any ELL question linked in a comment/answer/question by anyone should appear there. The Contributor’s Guide on [meta] is a good example of a fully populated “Linked” list. – ColleenV Jan 31 '19 at 16:10
  • @ColleenV: This is a lot for me to take in all in one day! I've also just worked out for myself that the "Upvote Count for the Question" value shows in green if there's an accepted answer. I should make a point of remembering that, because assuming I've already engaged with the current question, it should on average be easier / quicker / more trustworthy for me to see if there's a single "obviously best" answer on a linked question. So if I haven't already voted there, I should do so to help raise its prominence (which I think becomes more important if there's no "Accepted Answer"). – FumbleFingers Jan 31 '19 at 16:22

3 Answers3

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Neither; either repeat “news” or omit it entirely:

“We must distinguish real news from fake news.”

“We must distinguish real news from fake.”

Jeff Zeitlin
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    Interestingly, although I have at least "misgivings" about the usage, I found a few dozen written instances of *long trousers, not short ones* in Google Books. But you're quite right that we definitely can't / don't / won't use that construction with *news*. – FumbleFingers Jan 30 '19 at 17:23
  • His question is still somewhat valid, why isn't it valid to say "We must distinguish real news from fakes?" – Bill K Jan 30 '19 at 21:36
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    @FumbleFingers That's simply because news doesn't have a plural. "Ones" works in any case where you can refer to the noun as "those", such as "those trousers". No reason to have misgivings about this. – user91988 Jan 30 '19 at 22:34
  • @FumbleFingers That's because "trousers" is plural. One "trouser" is just a tube of material. During the middle-ages, people in Europe would wear a tube of material on each leg (a.k.a. "hose" - or, in Scotland, "trews" which then became "trouser") with a codpiece in the centre. Someone then re-invented the idea of stitching both tubes together with some extra material ("a pair of trousers") - which Asians had already been doing since the 10th Century BC for riding horses... – Chronocidal Jan 31 '19 at 09:28
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You're right.  The word "news" doesn't have a plural form.  That fact is a good reason to avoid using the pronoun "one". 

There is a useful description for nouns that don't have plural forms.  We call them strictly uncountable.  As either an adjective or a pronoun, the word "one" involves counting. 

Your examples are trying to count something that is strictly uncountable. 

Gary Botnovcan
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  • I found A fourth class of bipartite nouns (e.g. scissors, trousers) is generally recognised for English. Might that be as opposed to "not so strictly uncountable" nouns, that we can reference with I want the sharp scissors, not the blunt ones, or He's wearing short trousers, not long ones - whereas we can't do anything like that with *news*. – FumbleFingers Jan 30 '19 at 17:34
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    I don't see much similarity between pluralia tantum and strictly uncountable nouns like "news" and "software". The idea of something being uncountably plural doesn't make sense to me. The lack of a singular form and the lack of a plural form have different consequences. – Gary Botnovcan Jan 30 '19 at 17:44
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    But surely *trousers* and *scissors* are "uncountably plural", in that we have to use *ones* rather than *one* in my examples above. Whatever - Apparently the news are* good* (or *were*, back in Carlyle's day), but today the news can only take a singular verb form. – FumbleFingers Jan 30 '19 at 18:04
  • Yes, we use the plural form "ones" to agree with the plural form "trousers". That's evidence of counting, rather than evidence of a lack of counting. We're distinguishing between one and anything other than one -- a very limited counting, but that's all that English grammar provides. – Gary Botnovcan Jan 30 '19 at 18:18
  • Perhaps the very fact that it's invariably *the news* implies that at any given time we normally only think of *all current news* as being the only news there is. Except when we want today's rather than yesterday's news, or real news rather than fake. I just look forward to the day when fake news will be synonymous with yesterday's news. – FumbleFingers Jan 30 '19 at 18:24
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    @FumbleFingers Trousers and scissors aren't uncountable. They come in pairs. – Shufflepants Jan 30 '19 at 19:25
  • @Shufflepants: Ditto *pants, whichever side of the pond they come from, with whichever meaning (and* regardless of whether they're shuffled, or in some preset sequence! :) – FumbleFingers Jan 30 '19 at 19:28
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When we use the word "news" as in your examples, it refers to news in general, not specific articles. Therefore, it's an uncountable noun, and you can't use a singular pronoun to refer to it.

If you want to refer to a specific piece of news, we call it an "article" or "item". So you could write:

We must recognize real news articles from fake ones.

Barmar
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