I call those things “mice”, and I will until people start calling animals of the Mus genus “mouses”. – It’s the same word “mouse” for both.
I’ve always seen the plural written as bb’s on the sites I frequent . . . 
(Bolding mine.) Yes, but that’s not the determining factor (see post #18). The significant question is whether “mouse” is considered a literal term or a stylistic one in that application. As kunilou stated, the issue is not yet resolved.
Why would that surprise you?
Yes, I know the issue is not resolved, and many people prefer “mouses” for the computer devices. However, I’m not sure what is meant by “nonliteral/stylistic uses of the word”. If it means metaphorical extensions of a word’s denotation, then I’d disagree. For example, take a double extension. First you have “man”, plural “men”, denoting male human beings. That was extended to “man of war”, denoting a kind of naval ship, where the plural is “men of war”. The second extension was to “Portuguese man of war”, denoting a kind of jellyfish – and the plural of that is “Portuguese men of war”, not “Portuguese mans of war” or “Portuguese man of wars”. That’s because, when you look behind the metaphorical extensions, it’s still the same word “man”.
However, you should say “shamans” and not “shamen”, because the “man” in “shaman” does not come from the same word “man”.
Agree completely. See Stephen Pinker’s book, Words and Rules. That said, I fully expect it will usually be “Blackberries”. Sigh.
As for the Toronto Maple Leafs, I always thought is Toronto Make Believes. (They make believe they are a hockey team.)
To be technical, it’s BlackBerry, not Blackberry.
A bar bet settling phone call to Burger King confirmed that neither of these were correct:
Whopper Juniors
Whoppers Junior
(nor any abbreviated variants)
Whopper Jr.® sandwiches, FTW
So, a customer asking for “Three Whopper Juniors” would be told, “Sorry, we don’t sell anything called that”?
They would if I worked there. I’d say, “WTF? Why don’t you just be a man and order 1 Triple Whopper(R) Sandwich?” I’d say this even if he weren’t a man.
Kidding aside, I should’ve read the entire thread instead of posting my pointless reply after reading post #2.
They claim they will only sell Whoppers Junior to attorneys general and mothers-in-law – though I’ll bet they’d give in to tirades from angered Sergeants Major.
Because I… don’t have a good reason. I just rarely disagree with the holy Chicago Manual of Style.
Merriam-Webster lists both plurals, but Januaries is first. American Heritage lists only Januaries. The OED lists no plurals, but a quote: “Few Januaries have been preceded by such a week as Christmas, 1891” from that year [1892], and no instances of -ys. (No plurals at all under February.)
English certainly allows various authoritative sources to differ, so I can’t say that either is wrong. It does seem that there are pretty strong cases for either plural in this case, though.
Right, in fact the same rule explains other grammatical forms, such as the past tense: We say “I hung a picture”, but “the man was hanged by the neck until he was dead.”
Or: “The bird flew out of the tree”, but “The baseball player flied out in the second inning.”
Ed
The plural of Blackberry is mmmmmm, jam!
I see I am one of the late passersby here…
It is pointless to appeal to standards for creating plurals when there are none, obviously.
Because BlackBerry is a brand name and not the berry, the best way to create the plural is BlackBerrys.
I suspect you will not find an opinion from RIM since they consider BlackBerry a brand name that should only be used as an adjective.
Sent from one of my BlackBerries
We saw that!
Someone does
To quote Dr. Suess:
“Then he did the same thing to the other Who’s houses
Leaving crumbs much too small for the other Who’s mouses”
I have an ancient VW microbus whose colour is Mango Green/Seagull Grey.
When refering to the plural of this paint scheme of buses, I tend to write Mango’s rather than Mangoes.
Just seems more correct for describing the bus rather than the fruit.
Don’t know why.
In some odd way, I’m releaved to learn that there is debate about this, and not just me having a brain freeze.
BTW, I lean towards BlackBerrys. Treating it as a proper noun/name.
or maybe blackberripodes.
‘blackberry devices’ is anal, but ‘blackberry phones’ is ok.
and FTR, it’s african-americanberry.