This weekend, I took my family to Arby's to eat. My wife ordered us all some food, and filled the cups with some ice and some soda, then I got some sauce for my sandwich as well as some sauces for the kids' food. I wanted to share my wife's drink, so I asked her if I might have some drink, and she corrected me in a playfully pedantic way saying that "some drink" was not correct grammar in that case.
In perusing the Internet, I have found several people agreeing with her, but while I've seen plenty of assertion that my wording was wrong, nothing that I read explained why. During my searches, I also found several instances of "some drink" being used in that context, including Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" (which I figure has to count for something, right? 🙂 ) I thought the community of experts at StackExchange could help me out.
I've set the stage for my story deliberately, because the way I used the noun "drink" seems comparable, to me, to the way I used "food," "ice," "soda," and "sauce," and none of those other terms seem offensive to anyone. So I'm curious if "some drink" in my case actually is wrong (and why it's different from something like "some sauce"), or is it simply that alternative phrasings also exist (e.g. "some of your drink", "something to drink") which may be preferably more specific, but not technically any more correct?
Best Answer
It's not ungrammatical. I would say though that "give me some drink" sounds either the request of a man in dire thirst, or who has a plan to be very drunk in short order, (or as an old-fashioned or regional usage) while "give me a drink" a less coloured request for a single beverage.
We do generally refer to individual beverages as drinks as a countable noun, and the liquids as drink as an uncountable. So likewise, "give me a beer" and "give me some beer" are both valid, but not identical.
I note that while "give me some drink" and "give me a drink" are both found in ngrams, the latter is more common, and this is a growing trend. Meanwhile, while it finds "can I have a drink" and "please give me a drink", it doesn't find the some equivalent of either.