After waking up from a coma back in Jan (intubated in the ICU with what was probably Covid), a nurse gave me her phone with an ear-bud so I could talk to my wife. I was so disoriented that I stuck it in my nostril and was aggravated that I couldn’t hear anything.
She took her phone back, and didn’t give it to me again. She laughed but I still offered to buy her new earbuds.
As anyone who’s read a little Pratchett can tell you; a million to one shot is practically a dead certainty.
You are absolutely right. Still, I enjoy irregular plurals. Octopodes, OBVIOUSLY. Would we call them eight-foots? No, they’d be eight-feet. Hippopotamus… Hmmm. New one on me. Would it be hippoipotamus? I love it! Like attorneys general.
If I had the power, I’d reintroduce the dual number, just to keep things interesting. AFAIK, the only English word in the dual number is eyen, meaning two eyes. Maybe “both” qualifies?
Her we call resumés curriculum vitae. Now I don’t know Latin at all but there was an argument as to what plural should be for a load of them and, apparently, Latin had this grammar thing where if you said curricula vitae it would mean the many curricula of a life and it should be curricula vitarum.
I firmly believe we should just do them in English rather than languages we don’t speak. And most of us English speakers struggle with grammar as it is. And I just can’t spell in any language.
Tuiseal ginideach, but in Latin!
Obligatory:
It worked for Renoir…
I suppose he could have tied it on rather than inserted it. The anecdote was short on specifics.
I hadn’t heard that term before. Wikipedia says “both” is dual.
What about nouns that always mean two — “pair”, “couple”, “brace” for example?
What about things that take a plural form because they consist of two things — “scissors”, “shears”, “tongs”, “trousers”?
“I want a hippopotamus for Christmas
Only a hippopotamus will do
No crocodiles, no rhinoceroses
I only like hippopotamuses
And hippopotamuses like me too”
Yes, but could he paint 4 rooms in one day with a brush and not a roller?
The ‘n’ suffix was Anglo-Saxon, and I think it was just an ordinary plural - such as ‘hosen and shoon’ for socks and shoes. Most of that went in about 1400, but ‘housen’ was still current in ‘Lark Rise’, and ‘children’ is still going. If you want mad counting numbers, try Japanese, which has separate numbers for big things, flat things, flat things but stapled together, small furry animals, mechanical things no bigger than a typewriter, beers (when ladies are ordering). They mostly go to one of a few standard sets by about four.
Don’t get me wrong: I like randomness. I don’t want NewSpeak. But languages are living things and they do shed naturally.
Heh. I had never thought about that one. I would have unhesitatingly used ‘curriculum vitaes’, the way I would other compound sounds such as ‘bus stops’ or ‘fish tanks’; and not reached for my Latin ‘O’-level knowledge from the 60’s. I don’t know whether that is right, but it works for me.
Poor old Renoir. He suffered from rheumatoid arthritis for the last 25 years of his life. There are photos of him holding a paintbrush almost as though he was steadying it with his mouth. There is a BMJ article on how he coped. Towards the end of his life he used to sit in his wheelchair in the garden with a pencil tied to his hand so he could sketch. Some fool sees him struggling within fork at dinner and wonders “how he manages to paint those lovely paintings”.
In the same position, particularly if I was in pain, I might snap and reply “I stick the bush in my bleeding’ cock, that’s how”. And now people repeat it as a deep statement. “Ah yes, the great artists, they all paint with their passions as much as with a physical brush; is it not truly so?”
Here is a movie showing how he actually painted…
@smut_clyde may have pulled the Renoir idea out of his arse in the same way that I did for Bob (trying to stay on topic here re bums) - no disrespect to those with a more sophisticated cultural compass:
The things are mostly child and what else? Also, were any children previously missing?
I just want to say that it’s an orderly anal warehouse with an organized inventory.
Only what I remember from my Anglo Saxon Language & Literature class at Columbia in 1975 (taught by the wonderful Harry McKay Sundwall… I hope he’s OK!) – the n ending was for dual. In Anglo Saxon, an s is used for regular plurals. Your examples, hosen and shoon, are of course, items that occur in pairs, like eyen. He claimed that only in the Kent region (the last redoubt of the Jutes, apparently) is dual occasionally found.
Fond memory of Sundwall’s class – he asked the class what the plural for “neat” is (as in the gender neutral singular word for cow or bull; only used, AFAIK, in neat’s foot oil). We were baffled, then he told us: Cattle.
Q: What did we get stuck in our rectums in 2020?
A: 2020
Well, damn. I had tried reading Beowolf like an English tourist in Iceland, but I never was taught Anglo-Saxon and never even suspected a paired plural might exist. But it did…
But we have ‘ox’ and ‘oxen’, ‘child’ and children’. I suspect nothing is simple, where grammar is concerned. The people who use the language every day are not the ones who write grammar books, and probably saw, or wanted to see parallels with Latin.
The printer Caxton noted that words had changed since his youth, There were ‘egg’ and ‘eggs’, but also ‘eye’ and ‘eyren’ (and eggs do not come in pairs). There is a lovely quote of Caxton from 1490 in…
“Loo, what sholde a man in thyse dayes now wryte, egges, or eyren? Certaynly it is hard to playse every man, by-cause of dyversite and chaunge of langage.”
…but that is ‘Middle English’ and some way from ‘Anglo Saxon’.
Thanks for that.
Neat- I’d never heard that! So in the original language, when a wagon is pulled by more than two ox, they would be oxes? Or just ox? Or a team of… what?
Well, ya know what they say about guys with big fingers.
I would have just said ‘CVs’ and let somebody else sort it out.
