any luck finding it yet, blahedo? i’d like to know the truth.
As long as the word is a foreign word, and has not been absorbed into the English language, use the foreign plural. As soon as it is a fully English word, it gets the English plural. Thus, it is now proper to say viruses & medias, assuming you are talking about several forms of medias, as media is a group noun all by itself. That is, you would not say: “The medias are ganging up on him” But you could say “Of all the medias, I like print the best”.
Danielinthewolvesden said:
“That is, you would not say: “The medias are ganging up on him” But you could say “Of all the medias, I like print the best”.”
UGH! “Of all the medias, I like print the best***.”***" Has nobody payed attention to this thread?
I much prefer this sentence:
Of all the forms of media, I like print the best.
Yup, found it. I’d left it at home instead of my office. Great book, by the way: Pyles and Algeo, The Origins and Development of the English Language—I highly recommend it to anyone who finds this thread interesting. 
(Btw, shop around a bit: all the US sites had it for $60 or so, but I ordered it from a British one instead for just £14.)
Anyway. The relevant stuff can be found on p. 184, which I will selectively quote: ``A remarkable construction is the use of his, her, and their as signs of the genitive (his-genitive), as in Augustus his daughter' (... 1579), Elizabeth Holland her howse’ (… 1546) … An early example with his is from Ælfric’s translation of the Book of Numbers (made about 1000): We gesawon Enac his cynryn,' that is, We saw Anak’s kindred.’
``On the other hand, many English speakers came to regard the historical genitive ending -s as a variant of his. In its unstressed pronunciation, his was and is still pronounced without an /h/, so that Tom bets his salary' and Tom Betts’s salary’ are identical in pronunciation. Once speakers began to think of Mars's armor' as a variant of Mars his armor,’ … they started to spell the genitive ending -s as his. That such confusion did occur is shown by the occasional use of his with females, as in `Mrs. Sands his maid’… His was used when the genitive ending was pronounced as an extra syllable, and 's when it was not, the apostrophe also suggesting that the genitive -s was regarded as a contraction of his.’’
More fun quotes relating to this thread:
p. 188 ``…a confusion sometimes arose about which word the n belonged with. The Fool’s nuncle in King Lear is due to his misunderstanding of mine uncle as my nuncle, and it is likely that Ned, Nelly, and Noll have the same origin from mine Edward, mine Eleanor, and mine Oliver. The confusion is similar to that which today produces a (whole) nother from another (that is, an other).’’
pp. 189-90 ``In the neuter, however, an important change took place in the later part of the 16th century, when the new possessive form its arose. The older nominative and objective form hit had lost its h- when unstressed… The corresponding older possessive his remained the usual form in the early years of the 17th century.
``Perhaps because of its ambiguity, his was nevertheless to some extent avoided as a neuter possessive even in Middle English times: an uninflected it occurs from the 14th to the 17th century, and to this day in British dialect usage… Other efforts to replace the ambiguous his as a possessive for it include paraphrases with thereof… and of it… By analogy with other possessives ending in 's, the present-day form (at first written it’s, as many unstylish people still write it) began to be used instead of his, its, or the other options. Its is quite rare in Shakespeare and occurs only twice in Milton’s Paradise Lost; but by the end of the 17th century its had become the usual form…’’
And finally, p. 221 ``The choice of case for pronouns is governed by principles quite different from those found in the run of grammar books… The use of they, them, and their with a singular antecedent has long been standard in English. George McKnight (1928) has specimens of this solecism' from Jane Austen, Thomas De Quincey, Lord Dunsany, Cardinal Newman, Samuel Butler, and others. The *OED* cites Lord Chesterfield, who may be taken as a model of elegant 18th-century usage, as having written, If a person is born of a gloomy temper … they cannot help it.’ In America the National Council of Teachers of English has endorsed such use of the pronouns as a way of avoiding sexism in language; it is certainly less self-conscious and more traditional than the legalistic he or she or the variety of concocted pronouns that have been proposed.’’
I think I can’t recommend this book highly enough.
Wow. Didn’t mean to shut down the thread like that. Sorry… :rolleyes:
hmmm… interesting, blahedo.
can anyone verify this? with a different resource, of course.
Cool! Grammar, spelling … now all we need is some linguistics and etymology. I love this stuff!!
On the topics so far:
I use no-apostrophe-S-with-capitals for abbreviation plurals (PCs, TVs). I’ve changed over from the apostrophe-S form because I like this better. Due to my job, I type a LOT of acronym plurals. Once I got going, I dropped the apostrophes from numbers too. Now I leave that little puppy out whenever I can get away with it. Maybe it helps balance the outrageous overuse of apostrophes (and quotation marks) I see everywhere I go. Is there anything we can do about that?
My memory agrees with matt_mcl: the which/that choice depends on whether it’s a restrictive or unrestrictive clause.
I use multiple ending punctuation, but I make it up as I go. No rules to follow, so I do whatever seems most appropriate for that particular sentence. I do tend to follow the ‘end with a question mark for a question, end with an exclamation point for an exclamation’ system, though.
Gatsby - which side of the ‘punctuation in or out of quotation marks’ do you fall on? I follow the parentheses rules myself, as I think the ‘all punctuation belongs inside the quotes’ way looks stupid much too often. If you’re with me, then we’ll storm the walls. If you’re agin me, then En Garde! (dropzone can get over it. ;))
As someone reared in a region where “a whole nother” is commonly used, I’ve always been under the impression that it was an emphatic split of ‘another’, similar to “in-F*CKING-credible” and such. At least that’s the way I use it, as do most people I’ve heard.
Mr. Blue Sky - ahhh, now THIS is one of my pet peeves. How many years must I rant before English acquires a set of gender-neutral, singular third-person pronouns suitable for application to humans? (It’s been around twenty so far, thanks for asking.) At least now, others are taking up the battle. The Internet Generation may finally do it. blahedo, does your nifty book say anything about this? I’ve heard that we used to have one, but it was lost somewhere along the way.
As long as we’ve got the mavens collected, could someone go over the shall/will setup? I’ve never gotten the hang of that one.
P.S. Thanks for the thread, AerynSun! <crossing fingers that I don’t kill it.>
This is in no way an attempt to encapsulate the uses of will and shall, just what I’ve seen so far.
Shall is used in questions.
Will is used in statements.
People who think they are smart use shall as a form of “I might.” My 2nd grade teacher seemed to think this was the way to go. She was, of course, wrong, but that’s another story.
Example: “Shall I get the pot so I can boil the water?”
Example: “I will get the pot so I can boil the water.”
Now, there may well be more nitpicky ways of stating this. I may well be wrong. I’ve never heard definitively that this is the case; I have merely observed that it was more often than not.
This is a wonderful little linguistic tidbit and gets brought up in virtually every Linguistics 101 class as an example of infixing. Fun example, and guaranteed to titillate the students. (Now there’s a great word.)
It’s in there amongst my other quotings—last one. Since the 16th century or earlier, ‘they’ and related forms has been used as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun, often in fairly refined language. It was the 19th century prescriptivist grammarians that put the kibosh on it, along with ending sentences with prepositions, splitting infinitives, and various other perfectly good English constructions that had the misfortune of not appearing in Latin.
That’s a tricky one. I would say that very few people actually make the distinction anymore—almost always, when I hear ‘shall’ it’s just someone trying to sound formal. In my dialect at least, they are interchangeable. I think that the distinction used to be that ‘will’ implied a volitional component to the meaning (as if we said today “I want to and will …”), where ‘shall’ was strictly a statement about the future.
Hmm… a site on the web (http://www.edunet.com/english/grammar/modals.html) claims that ‘shall’ indicates obligation or promise.
…and further introspection brings me to the fact that the only time I hear ‘shall’ (aside from people trying to sound formal) is in the phrase “Shall we?” or “Shall we, then?”, often as shorthand for “Are y’all ready to leave yet?” I don’t know what that indicates, but it’s fun.
It depends on what “X” is. It is perfectly correct to say “There is a lot of water in the ocean.”
Vandal, I just have to point out that you probably mean “e.g.,” not “i.e.” (Okay, now I’ll probably improperly capitalize the next sentence, so shoot me.) “I.e.” stands for “id est,” or “that is.” “E.g.” stands for “exempli gratia,” meaning “for example.”
There’s a cartoon y’all should appreciate; it really belongs taped to the door of every grammar crank (like me! ;)): http://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif. The other Bob the Angry Flower comics are funny too, but this one just takes the cake. (And for the real linguistics geeks, http://www.angryflower.com/blame.gif.)
){kind=link}
Another good site is SpinnWebe, at http://www.spinnwebe.com/. Check out in particular the Apostrophe’s and “Quotes” features… aw, heck, just read the whole site. He’s taken crankdom to a whole new level.
from blahedo:
When I originally asked the Latin group for the plural, I mentioned what my guess was. In fact, my guess was “virus” for reasons identical to yours. But I was corrected.
Is it possible that both “vira” and “virus” occur as plural in classical or medieval Latin?
Hunh. Well, that’s what I’d heard. I took Latin in high school, but this was never covered; so I’ll rely on net research. Here’s some:
[ul]
[li]http://language.perl.com/misc/virus.html---this one seems very well-researched, and mostly supports me, but provides some possible alternatives and cites a lot of references.[/li][li]http://www.cknow.com/vtutor/vtplural.htm---claims viri.[/li][li]http://www.bumppo.net/lists/realbasic-nug/2000/01/msg01706.html---an amusing letter that supports me[/li][li]http://www.m-w.com/wftw/00jan/012800.htm---Merriam-Webster seems to agree, though again, doesn’t supply references[/li][/ul]
Various other sites I found were either of the opinion that there wasn’t a plural, or that it was viri, but none of them provide any references (or even any supporting reasoning) other than that first one I posted.
I have a question about hyphenation. How does one know when certain word pairs or compound words are supposed to be hyphenated?
Bullet proof / bullet-proof
Halfwit / half-wit
Stain resistant / stain-resistant
Service affecting / service-affecting
self styled / self-styled
My old crutch was to determine if the noun-adjective arrangement was non-standard for English (i.e., the modifier proof follows the noun bullet) then the two words needed to be separated by a hyphen. However, this has failed me on several recent occasions (e.g., long-sleeved [shirt]).
iampunah:
Please clarify your nit-pickitty (should that be hyphenated?) position on the placement of closing punctuation & closing quotation marks (hereinafter “QM”). The earlier sentence :
You corrected to read as:
However, on three grammar/punctuation sites I have visited, it seems to say the punctuation should be placed inside the QM only if it belongs to the quoted material, and outside the QM if it belongs to the sentence as a whole. That would seem to make the 1st version more correct since an helicopter is not, by itself, a sentence and therefore doesn’t deserve a period.
Regard:
Did somebody say “McDonalds”?
or
Did somebody say “McDonalds?”
Am I correct in stating that the 2nd version is in error?
With regard to:
But you could say “Of all the medias, I like print the best”.
The quoted words are themselves a complete sentence, and can therefore be granted a period thusly:
But you could say “Of all the medias, I like print the best.”
However, the complete sentence But you could say"
[quoted material including period]
" itself also needs to be closed with a period thusly:
But you could say “Of all the medias, I like print the best.”. I found at least one site that says this is permissible.
I was able to locate the following exceptions:
everybody else:
How have you dealt with narrow-minded and stubborn college professors who insist that the only way to pass their course is to adopt their bizarre standards of style? I helped out a friend on one of his final papers (I didn’t feel this was wrong because he was at a slight handicap) and changed the phrase “Day and Date:” in the paper’s heading to just plain old “Date:” on the grounds that “day & date” was redundant. Little did I know the instructor made a point of saying that a paper’s heading must contain the full phrase “Day & Date” followed by the date thusly:
Day and date: Friday, June 30, 2000.
Because of my correction, my friend received a whole letter grade reduction for that one “error”, and another for missing the hyphen that was supposed to be in “long sleeved”. I was incensed because this is supposed to be a class on style of composition, and every guide to style I have ever seen places wordiness & redundancy on the list of deadly sins.
I’m pretty sure that I would have burst into flames right there in the class if it had been me.
In the interests of being a pain in the butt,
don’t you mean e.g.?
Opus, in American English, periods and commas NEVER EVER go on the outside of the quotation marks. Colons and semi-colons NEVER EVER go on the inside. Exclamation points and question marks sometimes go inside, sometimes outside, depending on whether the punctuation goes with the entire sentence or just with the quoted portion. Perhaps that is what the sites to which you are referring are saying; if they are in fact saying that whether to put the period, for example, inside or outside depends on something, they are wrong wrong wrong. I’d bet my right arm on it.
In your examples:
Did somebody say “McDonalds”?
or
Did somebody say “McDonalds?”
You are correct - the second version is wrong, assuming that somebody stated the word “McDonalds.”
Note this example:
Did you say, “Who is she?”
You wouldn’t put another question mark outside the quotation mark. (This is the same situation as the McDonalds question, only here the words in quotation marks are in themselves a question, while in the McDonalds example, the word within the marks is not a question.)
Or:
Did somebody yell out “Cowabunga!”?
The exclamation point is included with the quotation marks because it punctuates just the word “cowabunga,” while the question mark is punctuating the entire sentence. However, if the sentence read, "Somebody yelled out “Cowabunga!” you wouldn’t put a period after the quotation mark.
Also, I thought that the text that you provided had a vaguely British tone, so I checked and it does come from a British text, The King’s English, 2nd ed., by H. W. Fowler. The rules for how to punctuate when using QMs is different in British English than in American English. My post refers to American English only; I think the difference between the two sets of rules is what confuses many people.
<I have a question about hyphenation. How does one know when certain word pairs or compound words are supposed to be hyphenated?
Bullet proof / bullet-proof
Halfwit / half-wit
Stain resistant / stain-resistant
Service affecting / service-affecting
self styled / self-styled>
I try not to hyphenate but to make another way of saying the same thing. For example, “She styled her hair herself,” instead of “Her hair was self-styled,” which thus eradicates the problem.
As a rule of thumb, when I don’t see a verb form in there, I don’t use a hyphen. Thus, halfwit, bullet-proof (proofed of bullets), stain-resistant (resistant to stains), service affecting (affecting service), self-styled (styled by yourself).
<Please clarify your nit-pickitty (should that be hyphenated?) position on the placement of closing punctuation & closing quotation marks (hereinafter “QM”). The earlier sentence . . . >
I’d go with “anal” or “stringent,” not nit-pickitty myself, just to avoid the problem you ran into there. I say, where you can make it simple, go for it
<However, on three grammar/punctuation sites I have visited, it seems to say the punctuation should be placed inside the QM only if it belongs to the quoted material, and outside the QM if it belongs to the sentence as a whole. That would seem to make the 1st version more correct since an helicopter is not, by itself, a sentence and therefore doesn’t deserve a period.>
The word “helicopter” ends the thought.
KEY thing to remember: I am telling y’all what I have been brought up to believe. Where I can I’ve given examples to show what I mean, but if you find someone with more pedagogy behind a difference of opinion, feel free to differ with mine. I haven’t run into an instance where what I believe grammatically isn’t correct, but that doesn’t mean I’m perfect. Far from it, in fact, as you’d know if you talked to me.
<Did somebody say “McDonalds?”
Am I correct in stating that the 2nd version is in error?>
I always learned that when a thought is finished within a set of quotation marks, the thought should end within those marks.
Keep in mind, though, that this is purely what I have learned. If you have a college prof who says your grade will depend on following the style of writing etc. set before you, by all means drop your qualms about it for that prof. Notice how I managed not to indicate the gender of the prof here.
Day and date: Friday, June 30, 2000.
<Because of my correction, my friend received a whole letter grade reduction for that one “error”, and another for missing the hyphen that was supposed to be in “long sleeved”. I was incensed because this is supposed to be a class on style of composition, and every guide to style I have ever seen places wordiness & redundancy on the list of deadly sins.>
I’ve always assumed that day means Friday June 30 and date means June 30. I don’t really distinguish between the two other than that.
As for long-sleeved, when I don’t know for sure if something should be hyphenated, I find another way of saying it. For example, “a long-sleeved shirt” could also be said to be “a shirt with long sleeves.” Wordy, perhaps, but it’s gotten me out of arguments before.
BTW, “thusly” isn’t a word I normally use. I have gotten accustomed to saying “as such” or “as seen here:” and things like those.
I surmised that by reading your previous posts, therefore your statement was superfluous 
With regard to the QM fiasco, I believe the Brits have it right. I just wonder who looked at the rule and felt it needed to be changed; it just feels better to me to place the period last in order to close the quotes and the containing sentence, instead of just the quoted material.
With regard to Day & date, my point was that anybody looking at:
Friday, June 30, 2000
should automatically know that Friday is the day and is a subset of the date, which is Friday, June 30, 2000. Does the phrase lose clarity or meaning by eliminating the word Day? No, therefore it is superfluous & redundant.
You know what? That’s actually what I resorted to because I wasn’t sure if long-sleeved should be hyphenated. The goofball professor crossed-out the entire phrase and wrote “long-sleeved shirt” in the margin. I tell you, you can’t win with this lady unless you can read her mind.
<I surmised that by reading your previous posts, therefore your statement was superfluous.>
You’ve got some problems with this statement. I would have said:
-
I surmised that by reading your previous post. Therefore, your statement was superfluous.
-
I surmised that by reading your previous post, so your statement was superfluous.
-
Your statement was superfluous because I surmised that by reading your previous post.
I could come up with more variations, but I think you get my point.
<With regard to the QM fiasco, I believe the Brits have it right. I just wonder who looked at the rule and felt it needed to be changed; it just feels better to me to place the period last in order to close the quotes and the containing sentence, instead of just the quoted material.>
I don’t know what to tell you other than that this is the first place I’ve ever been corrected on this matter. FWIW, my father majored in English in college and he used to correct me on lots of this shit.
< . . . should automatically know that Friday is the day and is a subset of the date, which is Friday, June 30, 2000. Does the phrase lose clarity or meaning by eliminating the word Day? No, therefore it is superfluous & redundant.>
To you it is. Some people understand different things from those than you do. For example, I have a friend who understands by the word “man” every human no Earth. By the word “man” I understand a physically mature person with a penis, no breasts, etc. We are none of us perfect.
[ed. note: that’s a common phrase in my family, and as such none of you is allowed to correct it]
<You know what? That’s actually what I resorted to because I wasn’t sure if long-sleeved should be hyphenated. The goofball professor crossed-out the entire phrase and wrote “long-sleeved shirt” in the margin. I tell you, you can’t win with this lady unless you can read her mind.>
Well, maybe you could have offered to get the long-sleeved shirt out of her ass.