Saturday, December 12, 2020

Losing Our Esses

For the duration of the 2020 baseball season, I hear, the Toronto Blue Jays played their games in the stadium of their farm team, the Buffalo Bisons.

The Buffalo Bisons. I don't know. That's a little on the nose for a team name, isn't it? It would be like if Marmot, Oregon had a team called the Marmot Big Fat Rodents. Also? The plural of bison is bison.

Which makes "bisons" wrong in the exact opposite way people are currently getting plurals wrong. Something has happened to perfectly good plurals. Lately, people have been losing their esses all over the place. It's a field of "irises," people, not a field of iris. And it's "ospreys," not a family of osprey. And it's "octopuses." (Or octopodes.) And, well, it never ends. You can't just drop the S willy-nilly and think you've nailed it.

I do understand that this is English and as such it is destined to be confounding. When you've got a big muscular language like ours that has plundered every other language for spare parts and an operating system, nothing is going to make sense.

But it is sort of helpful that a thick swath of our nouns gets pluralized by adding an S. Not all of them, of course. But that S can get you a long way, and you should not be unduly afraid of it.

Some nouns do not get an S because they're considered "uncountable." Rice, for instance. You don't buy a bag of rices. The grains are countable, and get an S, but the rice, not so much.

There are irregular plurals. If you have more than one mouse, I'm afraid you've got mice. Or meece, if there are a whole lot of them, or mousies if they're especially cute. A lot of the nouns that are the same singular and plural, like bison, are animals, such as sheep, or deer, or fish. You can have fishes, but they're usually biblical, and come with loafuses.

And sometimes the plural spelling of those animals is different depending on whether you're chucking them under the chin or hunting them. So you might keep a bunch of rabbits as pets, but you hunt rabbit. (Or wabbit.) Perhaps people say they're hunting elephant because they prefer to think that elephants are uncountable, which they emphatically are not. Shame on them.

But this business of dropping perfectly good esses is getting out of hand. We grow crocuses, not crocus. We plant agapanthuses, not agapanthus. Where does it end? Nasturtia?

You'd think this is the kind of thing that happens when you've scolded too many people for using extraneous apostrophes with their esses over the years. Maybe they've decided to skip the whole thing. But the apostrophe people are not the ones dropping the esses. They're fine with the way they spell and punctuate, and feel it is helpful to give a plural noun a nice apostrophe to help hook the S onto the word.

No, it's the people who strive to get it right that get it wrong. The first time they heard someone say "a bed of iris" they thought: Oh no. I've been saying irises all this time. But clearly this is some sort of Latin thingy and thus, because only erudite people know Latin, it is correct. And then they hear similar incorrect plurals, and rush to catch up to the erudition bandwagon.

And even so, nobody calls buttholes "ani."

It's hit or miss. Somehow we all know to say "asters" and "daisies" but go all to pieces over trilliums or dianthuses. We talk about mallards but suspect there are wigeon. I looked to the experts to find out why some things never take an S plural, and found this:

"They form a lexical category in Guiraud's sense, that is, a non-arbitrary set of nouns with common features at the level both of the signified and of the signifier, and constituting, from a diachronic perspective, a matrix having enabled membership of the category to develop until today."

Apropodes of nothings, the plural of bullshit is bullshit.

45 comments:

  1. You can't count on people to even know about countables versus uncountables when it comes to esses. They don't even know the difference between "less" and "fewer". I think they either didn't pay attention when they covered this in school, or else it just wasn't covered. The education system can be sadly lacking in teaching students the basics. I was fortunate to go to a Catholic elementary school (although I didn't think I was so at the time.) When I later went to a public high school, I could slack off for the first year and a half, because I had already learned the material in a lower grade. (Unfortunately, where math was concerned, the slacking became a habit. In the course of a year I went from As to Ds on my report card. But at least I know how to balance a checkbook and can make change without resorting to a calculator.)

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    1. If only balancing a checkbook and making change was still useful!

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    2. If only they WERE still useful. My ears hurt, too when someone speaks of LESS people. So now on two counts I’ve shown my age, and I’m older than dirt.

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  2. This was a fun (if not a little dizzying) read, you're obviously a bit too intelligent for your own good. But I think I just gave myself whiplash, nodding my head vigorously up & down at your "apostrophe people", as they shall be the death of me! I'd much rather forego the "S" if they could stop making plural nouns so goddamn possessive! Anyway, I must read your post again, Mongo likes word-candy!

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  3. I think that "less" vs "fewer" has gone by the wayside, much to my chagrin. However, I must admit to not being as bothered by "s", "es", no "s" as are some. I would point out that, although grains of rice are countable, so are subspecies of rice. "A collective noun for the plural form is a selection of rices."

    One of my displeasures is hearing a person refer to "myself" without antecedent.

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    1. Every time I write about any peccadilloes I can count on hearing everyone else's! We are a persnickety lot.

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  4. I'm not discombobulated. Not even combobulated. Just plain bobulated.

    Also,the plural of opus is opera.

    And thank you for another year of insights and fun. Count me in for 2021. Almost a poem.

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    1. Frightening, the number of these things I've shoved out there. Happy new year!

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  5. When my daughter Ronda was little, she had just learned to make plurals by adding esses to words. So, of course, she took it to its logical conclusion and said, "My nose are cold".

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  6. All I know is that in 1974, Jim Taul was working for an engineer, doing some kind of research on the quality of sound in large interior spaces. So he felt compelled to refer to such rooms as auditoria instead of auditoriums. For a hot second, I thought I should start referring to my mother's flowers as nasturtia instead of nasturtiums....

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    1. I believe you now should. Apropodes of nothing, I remember Jim Taul enjoying having someone else's thumb in his mouth, or possibly the other way around. You'd think I'd remember which side of that I was on.

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  7. One wishes the irregular forms were at least logically consistent. Mouse/mice, louse/lice, so..... house/hice? That would be nice. I mean it would be nouses.

    With the foreign words I think it just depends on how assimilated they are. Agenda was originally the plural of agendum, meaning an item on a list, but it's become an English singular word now. On the other hand, using "data" as singular -- "this data is" instead of "these data are" -- just sounds gratingly wrong to me.

    Always remember that one of the functions of standardized language, from ancient Mesopotamia down to today, is to give educated people a quick way of identifying each other. All those dropped plural esses are an inadvertent signal of not quite making the cut.

    They form a lexical category in Guiraud's sense, that is, a non-arbitrary set of nouns with common features at the level both of the signified and of the signifier, and constituting, from a diachronic perspective, a matrix having enabled membership of the category to develop until today.

    The nature of our language allows a person to say things like this, but it does not allow him to mean anything by them. Even with perfect grammar, bullshits are still bullshits.

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    1. The weird aspect of this particular persnicket is that it's the educated people who think the plural of iris is iris.

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    2. That's not educated, just pretentious.

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  8. From now on, it's loafuses and nasturtiumeses for me.

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  9. I need a lawyer to explain that last paragraph.

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  10. Here's a sentence from one of my college seniors: "American’s view America as a perfect country but fail to see the countries short comings."

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  11. I'll just start out with"irregardless" and leave it to youse.

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    1. Yes, my sweetie used to use "irregardless" quite a lot, as well as "paramutations" in place of permutations. I withstood it as long as I was able, and then corrected him in private. He listened, and has not used either term for the last three decades or so.

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    2. But "paramutations" are real! They only happen during a full moon.

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    3. In July Merriam-Webster accepted irregardless and added it to the dictionary, much to the chagrin of many. 2020....

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  12. I recall a child of a friend, learning to play scrabble...she added gery to bug. Shock!Horror! from the adults. But, as the child saw it, if the place where pigs are sequestered is a piggery, then bugs must...I have no idea how she dealt with esses...

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  13. I'm pretty sure I knew most of this, but when planting a single agapanthus bulb or crown, whichever is the correct term, am I planting agapanthus singular or is it still agapanthuses because the one crown or bulb produces multiple flowers? Either way, there are enough agapanthus beds around here that I never need to plant any at all.

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    1. I was told that someone calls agapanthus "angry panthers" which is one way to deal with the problem of the plural. I have found no way to deal with them that doesn't involve a shovel or a nasty herbicide.

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  14. Word butchers! The possessive and plural apostrophe criminals abound. Some of the worst writers in the world are physicians and researchers, whose medical journal reports end up conveying almost exactly the opposite impression they intend, and if you do not understand the disease/disorder and its technical aspects your patient may well be misdiagnosed and/or mismanaged.

    And what pray tell, does one do with the *ta-ted* syllables laid into certain words by speakers? I hear one of these thrown in and hear *nothing* said after. Oriented becomes "orien-ta-ted". Disoriented becomes 'disorien-ta-ted'. There are others but two examples suffice. This one just drives me bonkers. I want to rise in my seat and scream, "Learn to speak the Queen's Lingo before taking to the stage!", but they'd cart *me* off, rather than the miscreant, so alas, I keep still and grind me molars.

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    1. Maybe someone should be appointed to administrate.

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  15. Perhaps "Buffalo Bisons" came from the Department of Redundancy Department along with such horrors as "chai tea." On the other hand, I dare say that if Beaver, in Tillamook County, Oregon had a team and a local tycoon named it the Beaver Beavers, that would be worse. When I found that the NYTimes style manual was insisting on pluralizing "millennium" as "millenniums," I lost all hope.

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    1. I would LOVE to cheer on the Beaver Beavers! I'd be a Beaver Beaver Believer!

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  16. Out in Sedona there are these spots where the earth’s energy is said to concentrate and swirl and do amazing things to your insides. One such place is called a vortex. Woe be to the Easterner who dances into town, seeking energy repair, and knowing a little Latin, who refers to the sites as “vortices.” Sedonans call them all “vortexes” and that’s that.

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    1. Oh golly, you reminded me of the person I know who swore the local Vortex was real, and we smirked and told her how they were sprinkled all over the US, and she said "Well it could be there's something linking all of those spots together," and Dave said "Yeah--Route 66."

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  17. "Osprey" comes from avis praedae, "bird of prey," so the plural of course is "ossprey," which sounds a lot like osprey if you're not listening closely.

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