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as in 'I hate you meeces to pieces'

...wait, no.

I see no problem with declining 'vinyl' to indicate number. Maybe we should decline it to indicate case as well:

nominative: vinylum
accusitive: vinylen
genetive: vinyline
ablative: vinylite
foolingyourselfative: vinylhasalovelywarmsounddoesntit
primitive: vinylshouldbeadeadformatwhyarepeoplestillfuckingobsessedwithit

No one called it "vinyl" until after CDs came around. It was ALWAYS records. If records is vinyl, then mp3 downloads is ether.

it's in The Wire now. BE AFRAID

This would seem, at least by first impression, to be as clear an example of artificial linguistic in-group snobbery as we could ask for. People who favor vinyl records are a self-defined in-group to begin with, and here we have a fake linguistic rule to further establish who is in and (more importantly) who is out.

Linguistics rant ahoy: mostly addressing Willma from February.

When someone mentions 'a vinyl', they mean 'a vinyl record' - except the noun, 'vinyl', is elided (left out). This sort of thing happens all the time in English, e.g. 'pass the horseradish' is actually 'pass the horseradish sauce', I don't want an actual horseradish. The elided noun can be inferred from context: there's sauce on the table, or if we're talking about music, then the vinyl refers to records.

So 'I'm getting a vinyl' is actually fine from a grammatical perspective. You might not personally like it, but take your grammar peeves elsewhere, grandpa.

As for mass/count nouns: in the case of vinyl records, we're obviously talking about something that comes in discrete units - records - as opposed to an amount of the raw material. It's like beer: you can have two beers, that's fine. It means you had two pints or bottles or whatever - two discrete units, which are inferred from context even if the unit itself is elided.

Nobody would accuse you of trying to enumerate a mass noun if you said you'd had two beers. Unless you were out with the Queen's English Society, but those fuckers are gone, so you're safe.

The question here is where does the plural marker go when the noun is elided. 'A vinyl record' becomes 'A vinyl', no probs, but what about 'Vinyl records'? The plural marker (the s) attaches to the noun, BUT THE NOUN IS GONE. So it attaches to the adjective instead: 'vinyls'. If you like, you can think of the plural marker as free-floating, a reminder of a noun sadly departed: 'Vinyl s'. Better? It's like a little headstone :(

Generally, if the majority of speakers in a community are using a certain construction, or using a word in a certain way, and you're the only one who has a problem, then maybe you're the one who is 'wrong, wrong, wrong'. I haven't seen usage stats for 'a vinyl' with elided noun 'record': can't really Google for elided words, so I can't do a rough search. I can say that it sounds okay to me, and I'd be careful about not applying my own biases about people who might say 'a vinyl' to any linguistic opinions.

But since willma offers no proof either, those assertions are totally baseless.

Nobody is the tsar of English: you can have strong opinions, but nobody gets to lay down the law.

I'd guess that willma's problem here (apart from being a prescriptivist) is that he(she?) doesn't know how elided nouns work. Why would he: they're not there. So he misapplied the little knowledge he does have (mass nouns), and came up with totally the wrong answer.

That's the problem with prescriptivists. They want to lay down the rules, but they don't even know what they are half the time, and they tend to mistake their own malformed opinions for fact. Most of things that get mentioned as 'rules of grammar' aren't even that, they're really just points of style (split infinitives, dangling modifiers etc).

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Btw the thing about 'a wax' isn't proof that 'a vinyl' is ungrammatical. For one thing, 'vinyl record' is by far the more common way to refer to the object in question:

Google search for 'vinyl record': 8.99m
Google search for 'vinyl records': 17.7m
Google search for 'wax record': 43
Google search for 'wax records': 331k

The other thing about elided nouns is that the word that's left, the adjective (or the noun in the adjective position). It has to imply the missing noun in a fairly unambiguous way, or unambiguous in context at least.

Hence, 'a vinyl' is okay most likely because so few things are made of vinyl. It's basically records and dildos at this point. Likewise, 'a 12"' is fine, because it also describes an important property of the record, to the extent that you can infer the noun just from that property.

I don't think it holds up with wax because records aren't made of wax, are they, they're made of vinyl. 'I went on Amazon and bought a wax' - a wax what? But say, 'I went on Amazon and bought a vinyl', and we're talking about records. Even in the context of music, 'I've got a new wax' is clear enough to parse, but not as clear as 'vinyl'.

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I don't particularly like the phrase 'a vinyl', but that's not the point. The point is when prescriptivists see something they don't like, they often say 'this breaks the rules!', citing either the wrong rules or their own opinion as fact, when really they haven't a clue.

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Here's an analogy for you: 'glass'. Glass is a mass noun, which also gets used in the adjective position to describe other nouns. Glass window, glass figurine, glass statue.

Except nowadays, when you think about glass in the context of drinking vessels, it magically becomes a count noun: one glass, two glasses. HOLY SHIT A PLURAL.

Here's my guess: for literally millions of years it was used as an adjective, as in 'a glass vessel/beaker/tumbler/whatever'. Then, in olden days, someone elided the noun, leaving as 'a glass', and context would help listeners understand what this person was referring to.

But then some prick brought it up in a medieval forum somewhere - like an actual forum - declaring that 'glass has no plural' and 'just as a heads-up, you can stop saying glasses'. But lo! This prick was not actually in charge of the language, so people ignored him and kept using words and phrases in ways that best helped them to communicate.

Elided noun, motherfuckers.

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but this is pretty smug and snooty.