Andrew and I were in The Container Store. We'd ended up in different areas, and I'd done all the shopping I needed to do. Rather than trying to navigate the maze of containers to find him, not knowing if maybe he was trying to do the same thing, I decided to just call him on the phone. "Where are you?" I asked. He said, "I'm in the container section." I said, "We're in The Container Store. Every section is the container section." We decided to meet at the check-out.
I've been ribbing him about it ever since. In his defense -- my mom agrees with him on this -- I suppose it's possible that when you say you're in the container section of The Container Store, you're actually making sense. Trashcans and hampers are sold at The Container Store and are technically containers, but nobody calls them containers, so if you were in the trashcan section, you would just say you were in the trashcan section. If you were in the hamper section, you would say you were in the hamper section. Food containers, on the other hand, are containers, yes, but they're also called containers. The container section of The Container Store is the section where the containers are located, not the containers that are merely technically containers, like trashcans and hampers, but the containers that are containers and are called by that name: containers.
There's containers in general, and then there's a subset of containers also called containers, a specific kind of container. It's like "container" contains another meaning of container within itself.
