universal grinder

The story

From universal + grinder, from the idea that an object that is countable can generally be turned uncountable if put into an imaginary grinder and reduced to a mass of small pieces. The term was first used in print in a 1975 journal article by the American linguist and philosopher Francis Jeffry Pelletier (born 1944), after a suggestion of the American philosopher David Kellogg Lewis (1941–2001): see the quotation.

First known use, by meaning

• from 1975 A notional mechanism whereby countable nouns are made uncountable.