Grammatical Goofiness: Plural Puzzlers!

In High School (quite a few years gone now), I studied Latin, Greek, and Human Anatomy. In the interest of full disclosure, let me say that only one of those courses was actually offered at the tiny, private school I attended. The Latin and Greek were strictly self-study, and I prided myself on knowing the correct Latin plurals for the muscles, bones, and other parts of the body.

It was not too long before I hit a snag in my linguistic snobbery. Some of the names of body parts can not be correctly pluralized in Latin. Well, there’s a work-around, using something called the Terminologia Anatomica, but, if you are a purist for that system, you will refer to the pituitary gland as the glandula pituitaria. And we’re trying not to sound like a doofus here.

Not sounding like a doofus is precisely what it comes down to—accuracy is important, but not sounding ridiculous is also a big priority. By way of example, we often hear very educated people refer to stadia as the plural of stadium, but how far should we take that? These same educated people may sometimes say that the plural of museum is musea (although Answers.com says, succinctly, “No, the plural in English is museums.”) but with that plural, we run merrily up to the bounds of silliness and perhaps beyond.

The danger increases with the less familiar, more bizarre plurals, such as those purists who insist on pluralizing index as indices. The urge to point and laugh becomes almost impossibly high when someone uses irregular plurals like that. As a snarky joke, a friend used to pluralize “Kleenex” (registered trade mark) as “Kleenices” and “Xerox” (also registered trade mark) as “Xeroces.” Of course, if Kleenex were Latin, I think it would pluralize as Kleeneges or something…but it has been almost three decades since I cracked the Latin books.

Some other hilarious plurals exist in the anatomy world: femur becomes femora, sternum becomes sterna, mandible’s plural is sometimes given as mandibula (I’m serious…although even the stodgiest medical dictionaries seem to have mandibles nowadays), larynx becomes larynges, and one of the all-time craziest, the male reproductive organ called the epididymus pluralizes out as epididymides. There are also people who insist on pluralizing the word penis as penes (pronounced PEE-neez), which is also screamingly funny to anyone who was ever a Junior High School student.

One very educated friend suggested that if something is a Latin word, it should get a Latin plural. Here, we can run into trouble too. Camera is in the Latin dictionary. But you will never catch me saying “We have three digital camerae in our house” … again, not to sound like a doofus is a priority here.

This begs the question: why should it only apply to Latin? I know there are some very smart folks who use chateaux as the plural of chateau, so should all words of French origin be pluralized exactly as they would be in the native language? Of course, most French words use –s or –es to make their plurals, but it’s a highly irregular language. By some accounts English derives as much as 30% of our vocabulary from French, we would have to use a few zany plurals.

If we are going to use Latin and French plurals, we really should probably show some love to Greek as well. Then you would have to say “The centauroi were the half-man, half-horse creatures of legend.” This also implies that the plural of hippopotamus would not be “hippopatomi” as many wags suggest, but “hippopotomia” (or something very like that) … try THAT one at your next gathering of Very Smart People and see who takes you seriously after that. (“Dinosaurs” comes from Greek too, so I guess you could say “the Natural History Museum has many dinosaures (said ‘dino-SAU-reez’)”…you know, if you are feeling like doing so.)*

German is practically one of our parent tongues, so we certainly need to be accurate there as well. So next time you are gonna get some sausages at the deli, make sure to order a few bratwürster for dinner.

Many Italian food names are plural. But please, in your quest for accuracy, we implore you not to say “We left no spaghetto uneaten.” Seriously…

Hebrew often takes the –im form when pluralizing. That said, I suspect that any non-Hebrew speaker who says something like “there were two Rabbanim at that synagogue today” is likely to be sound like aforementioned silly person

Speaking of derivations from that language, while researching this article, I came across a wonderful piece about the plural of the word bagel. Two people were arguing over whether the plural should be “bagels” or “bagel” (as it would be in Yiddish) … the authority responds:

“I might say, as the rest of us who say “bagels” when speaking English — is right. Simply stated, the rule is this: When a word borrowed from a foreign language has become domesticated in the borrowing language…it obeys all the borrowing language’s grammatical rules, including those governing the formation of plurals.”

English is a language of exceptions, and of course there are some words that will always take irregular, foreign-y plurals. I’m not going to start saying “criterions” or “crisises,” for example. I’m just saying that it’s good to think before you pluralize. We must be careful not to sound like doofuses. Erm…doofi? No, doofuses…definitely doofuses.

*The delightful Miss Annie tells me that the Danish word for dinosaur is “dinosaurus” which pluralizes in Danish to “dinosaurusser.” Rather than spitting out that mess of a word, most Danes elect to say “dinosaurs.”