Re: Off topic: Latin plurals

["Russ Spittler" spittler@xxxxxxxx]

Something similar happened, I understand, with "kudos," Greek for
glory--singular. But the S on the end led many English users to assume it's
a plural, and so in frequent usage it has become. I think too that the
pronunciation too has shifted accordingly: from rhyming with "two toes"
(roughly) to rhyming with "blue moss."     Is that EFA newsletter
online somewhere?
 Russ Spittler


----- Original Message -----
From: "Patricia M Godfrey" 
To: 
Sent: Saturday, June 22, 2002 12:06 PM
Subject: Off topic: Latin plurals


> Well, we do say "genera" in taxonomy: "This family has only 2 genera but
> 25 species." But "de minimus" is just plain pretentious ignorance. The
> IRS--why am I not surprised?--actually printed that in its tax
> instructions one year, an accountant repeated it, and the article got
> printed in the newsletter of the Editorial Freelancers Association, a
> professional organization of copy editors and proofreaders, along with
> other editorial types. I (who was secretary of the EFA at the time, and
> write a regular column on matters grammatical) blew my stack, and wrote a
> diatribe about people who "deck their dull chat" (Sheridan, of Mrs.
> Malaprop) with foreign words and get them wrong.
> "Data," however, may be a different matter. Yes, it is plural in form.
> But plurals can become singulars if their meaning changes. The classic
> case is "agenda": literally it means "things to be done," but once it
> acquired the meaning "a list of things to be done," it made sense to make
> it a singular. And "data" is now often used with the meaning "dataset,"
> or "body of data." Note that we say "much data" and "little data," not
> "many" and "few." So I think it's moving toward singularity, and will
> probably be considered a collective in a few more years.
> Patricia
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