That would be a dictator of ‘humorously shaped vegetables’
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What you did there, I saw it.
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I speak with perfect Dickchen.
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A cockle
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I have two thoughts. First, why not take ten seconds to look it up? Various online dictionaries list two plurals for penis: penises and penes. No penii.
But then again, since we’re writing in English, why use a foreign-language plural at all? There’s some odd compulsion to mangle plurals of words that seem Latinate – penis and Prius being the prime offenders – and it’s just not necessary. Priuses. Penises. Octopuses. Embrace them. Not literally.
Bonus peeve: plurals never require apostrophes.
(Okay, there are some edge cases. “Do’s and Don’ts” is a nightmare. But “hot dog’s”? What is wrong with people?)
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What goes up must come down
Spinning Wheel got to go ‘round
Talkin’ ‘bout your troubles
It’s a cryin’ sin
Ride the painted penii
Let the Spinning Wheel spin
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I always thought that the plural was pedant’s…
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I thought that this was the proper marking for getting potholes repaired:
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Party?
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Surely if the plural is “peeves” then the singular is “peef”.
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bang? (as in gangbang …)
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Oh, now you’ve gone and done it!
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Oh, is that how that was supposed to work? I thought it was some kind of mystical healing charm. Here I was drawing penises all over my sprained ankle…
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Quite right. As everyone knows, the correct plural for penis is penes. The same pattern as for crisis, exegesis, and thesis. You never even heard the plural for penis until about ten years ago, but now that it’s ubiquitous, will someone get it right FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST?
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Six months of Latin, thirty years ago.
Weirdly, it was pretty much the only thing I was taught in High School that was ever any use to me. A smattering of Latin comes in very handy for the biological sciences.
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I think she might be on a road trip with Carmen Sandiego, trying to get a fix for potholes.
Oh my, this punning plan might backfire badly…
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De cromulentia verbi “enmagnare” non est disputandum.
Ah, case orders.
So…
- Case orders are arbitrary.
- Case orders are traditional.
As with all things that are both arbitrary and traditional, there are some corollaries:
- The traditional order is probably sub-optimal according to some criteria.
- Some people will come up with a marginally better system and create annoying incompatibility for dubious gains.
- People care. There’s probably some place in Tartarus (in Tartaro) reserved for those who disagree with the only proper case ordering: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Vocative, Ablative.
- Different national traditions evolve.
The NGDAVA order seems to be quite old and is what is used at Austrian schools for German (NGDA), Latin and Ancient Greek (NGDAV). I failed to quickly google the beginnings of the tradition of writing down grammars for the Latin language - does anyone know when the first declension table was written down?
The NVA… order seems to have started with some 19th century british grammar book which consciously rearranged the cases to put the similar forms next to each other for didactic purposes. Also, German as a foreign language is often taught with NADG order, because that’s the order of frequency and importance.
It will end up confusing those second-language speakers of German, though; many native speakers use “4. Fall” (fourth case) as a synonym for accusative.
And of course, there’s the question of what counts as a case.
The Latin vocative only has a different form in one declension class, and the locative is even rarer. Vocative still got a case number, the locative didn’t.
Teachers of ancient Greek in Austria stop counting at four - the vocative in Greek is about as common as the Latin one, but as Greek has no ablative, the vocative is in the final position and can be left out.
The people of Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Montenegro seem to be very proud that their four “completely different” languages have seven cases, nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental. However, I have yet to find a single word for which the vocative form differs from the dative form.
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From 1754
https://books.google.com/books?id=CVFgAAAAcAAJ&dq=cases+latin+declension&source=gbs_navlinks_s
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1754 is a good start.
I googled some more.
Googling for latin-language latin grammars takes us back further in time:
But that’s still way to late.
People have been studying Latin for far longer than that. And before that, ancient Greek.
I googled some more.
And found a certain Διονύσιος ὁ Θρᾷξ, also known as Dionysios Thrax, who probably lived in the second century BC.
He wrote a grammar of the Greek language.
An English translation can be found here, and on page 10 that reads:
There are five Cases, the right, the generic, the dative, the
accusative, and the vocative. The right case is called also
the nominative and the direct; the generic, the possessive, […]
Roman grammarians just tacked the ablative on at the end.
So, it’s official: This is how it has been for over two thousand years. This is the only true case order for indo-european languages that have grammatical cases.
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I stand here in awe at the effort involved in coming up with this definitive determination.
“Oh my god… it’s full of rabbit holes…”
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