differencesmeaning
I googled but I couldn't find a proper answer. In movies I often hear phrases like:
"We are a good people" or
"Asgard is not a place, it's a people".
Why put an "a" in front of the word people? Wouldn't it be the same to say "We are good people" or "Asgard is not a place, it's people"?
Is that just another form of saying it (old style?), or does it give another meaning to the sentence?
I feel for your confusion at the circular definitions. Here is how I think of these as a native English speaker.
First, you know that all of these terms refer to many things all located close to each other so they are thought of as related as a group. Usually, if they are physical things, they will be very close, maybe even touching each other, often on top of each other. If they are abstract things, then they are related in another sense of close together or collected.
Usually, these terms are not used for live or animate things, unless to make a point by being odd. However, they can be used for dead things, e.g., a pile of corpses.
Now, there are two properties that you have to ask about to tell the terms apart.
A heap is big. A stack and pile can be small, medium, or big.
A stack is organized. A pile and heap can be organized or unorganized, but often unorganized. Other concepts similar to organization here are alignment and order.
These are only the main meanings that come to mind. It would not be incorrect to say that an organized group of papers is a pile of papers. It would also not be wrong to tell someone to organize a stack of papers, because maybe it is not organized to this person's standards.
So if a group of papers is small, you should not call it a heap. And if a group of papers is very messy, you should not call it a stack. The others are more flexible and vague.
When you are talking about abstract objects, you should be more careful about using stack and pile. It is common to say he is in a heap of trouble, I have a heap of problems, or I'm gonna/going to give him a heaping of hurt. The word mound also covers some of the same ground. It is less common to describe a group of abstract things as a pile or stack. Two notable exceptions are of course when these are technical terms for mathematical objects or datatypes. I suspect this might be because the real meaning that heap adds in the former case is bigness. I have a heap of problems means that you have a lot of problems all close together.
If this is a lot to remember at once, you can think roughly of these terms as growing increasingly specific. RoaringFish's comment made me think of this ordering, which is by increasing messiness:
stack ≤ pile ≤ heap
You might also think of these as being proper inclusions if you are familiar with sets:
stack ⊂ pile ⊂ heap
This picture depicts these relationships.
This means that everything that counts as a stack can also be called a pile or a heap, though calling it one of these is being less specific (you should generally be as specific as appropriate). Everything that can be called a pile can also be called a heap. But you cannot go in the other direction. There are things that you can call heaps but cannot call stacks.
"Redundant" involves repetition. In the following example, there are two examples of redundancy: "This blue, azure shirt is torn and ripped." Blue and azure are redundant, and torn and ripped are redundant. Note that these redundancy pairs do not include words that are exactly synonymous, but which are close enough in meaning that one would usually consider them redundant. Two points here: 1. Neither word in such a pair is necessarily the redundant one; either one can be considered redundant, depending on which one you consider to be the more important, useful, or accurate one in the given context. Commonly, the second word is considered the redundant one, but that is merely because the first word got a chance to establish itself before the second one came along; if you were revising the text, you might choose to keep the second, not the first. 2. The same word repeated ("this blue blue shirt") is an example of redundancy, but this is usually done for emphasis, or for poetic effect, and so is seldom saddled with the accusation of redundancy. Thus, "redundant" does tend to carry the implication of an unnecessary repetition.
A tip: To help you remember this, note that "redundant" begins with "re," as in "repetition." That piece of these words means "again."
"Superfluous," on the other hand, refers to something that is more than what is necessary. Think of water running over the rim of a glass when you continue to pour water into it beyond its capacity. The water over- (super) flows (fluous). Often something superfluous is so because it is needlessly repetitive, and this confuses the picture a bit. But in my opinion, "superfluous" is better used when the element is not repetitive, but is genuinely not needed, as in this example: "After George embedded the fence post in thirty pounds of concrete buried underground, the brick he balanced atop the post to hold it down was superfluous."
Best Answer
Dictionary.com provides quite a few definitions for people, most relevantly:
Looking at the first definition, you would say something like "they are good people" when referring to any collection of individual human beings (without necessarily a common trait).
For the second definition, note that there can be multiple such bodies of persons that constitute a set group (sorted by nationality, culture, religion, etc.); take for example citizens of Wakanda and citizens of Asgard. If you want to refer specifically to the Asgardians, you would say "The Asgardians are a people", distinct from every other group of people. I guess you could say there is an implied sense of unity in saying something like "the Asgardian people" or "we (the citizens of Wakanda) are a good people".
Saying "a people" is not an old style of English, nor merely a different way of saying "people". It does indeed give another meaning to the sentence by grouping certain people by a common trait.