What is the plural of “Johnny come lately”? Is it “Johnnys come lately” or “Johnny come latelys”?
My guess is “Johnnys come lately”, but I look forward to correction.
While I’m on the subject, I know that it’s “time outs” not “times out”, because that’s how it’s used. However, if the term were invented by English majors rather than sportscasters (who may be English majors themselves), would it have been “times out”? What is more correct from an English first principles perspective?
This phrase is not a part of formal English, like Attorneys General, but of colloquial English. Anything other than “Johnny come latelys” would be false pedanticism.
There is no such thing as “English first principles,” BTW. There is only usage.
I think Attorneys General and Courts Martial comes from French, right? However, I think mothers-in-law is proper, not pedantic, isn’t it?
Agreed that there’s no real English first principles, but it is fair to say that, in general in English you would…something. For example, plurals would typically take an s, so a newly coined word would probably take an s for the plural. Past tense would typically take an 'ed, so a newly coined verb would probably take an 'ed.
Would you make the noun plural, like mothers in mothers-in-law (in general)? Or, make the last word plural, like time outs?
It might be pedanticism, but I don’t think it’s false pedanticism necessarily. That would only be the case if “johnny come latelies” were a commonly accepted and used plural form out there already, or if you insisted that “Johnny come latelies” was wrong, wrong, wrong.
I think either form would work, considering there is not an already-established usage.
Just to give the question some context, I was playing a sport this morning and a few guys showed up late. I left on the earlier side and they were giving me some crap (the weather was just terrible), so I wanted to say, “hey, all you Johnnys-come-lately, if you had shown up on time, you’d be with me”, but I didn’t bother.
Maybe this should be in IMHO if there’s no GQ answer.
On the “there’s only usage” front, I was thinking further about newly coined terms – if someone makes a new word, like commodify, and someone asked me the past or progressive cases, it’s not like I’d be at a total loss. I go with commodified and commodifying. If usage turns out different, that’s fine, but English does have some guidelines. It’s not like I’d go with the German progressive, for example.
What sounds natural to my ear is “Johnny come latelies”.
On the usage front one can do an Ngram viewer and by that “Johnny-come-latelys” wins (peaking in 1945).
It must be noted however that the lead that form has is now smaller than it had been.
Looking at dictionary sites, which I should have done before posting this I guess, it looks like both are acceptable.
Those Google ngram charts are interesting, but the results are usually so tiny (0.0000005%) that I wonder if they are really significant. That’s a thread for another day, I suppose.
If you plug in Johnny-come-latelies you find it’s even more used than the others.
Johnnys-com-lately is a false pedanticism, on the order of “between you and I.” The only people who would use it are the ones who don’t quite understand how English works and so try to apply half-remembered “rules” from school to sound correct. English teachers necessarily impose zillions of so-called “rules” to keep pupils from making crude mistakes. Most of the time you can’t go wrong applying these strictures; they become usage by repetition. The problem is twofold. 1) Since these “rules” are made up not everyone gets taught them, or gets taught different subsets. 2) The “rules” can’t cover every possible variation. That’s why so many style guides exist, each authoritative and absolute in their realm, each shunned outside of it.
Obviously, English has basic rules of grammar that are slow to change. So one can normally apply standard grammar to new verbs, precisely because new verbs are normally treated as regular verbs. But English also has zillions of irregular verbs that must be individually learned. A toddler will logically say “I goed to the store,” but that isn’t good English.
Obvious logic can’t be always be applied. The result usually reflects when in time the term got more or less frozen in place. Attorneys General is old. But Attorney Generals is being seen more and more; it has nearly 25% of the earlier term’s hits on Google. To-day and to-morrow were the forms in use well into the first quarter of the 20th century in the US and longer in the UK. Seeing them with the hyphens looks completely wrong to modern eyes.
English is trending in the direction of moving the plural to the end. If Attorneys General is going, they’ll all someday fall. And the old forms in historic documents will look weird and unacceptable. Including this thread.
I strongly disagree with this. “Between you and I” is just wrong – there is no reason to use the subjective instead of the objective case (I sure hope to heck those are the right terms) i.e. “I” instead of “me,” except for grammatical ignorance. However, there might be a reason for using “Johnnies-come-lately” in that, the “come lately” part was originally adjectival description and would be the same for one Johnny or several. Having the phrase hyphenated probably obviates that consideration to a considerable extent by transforming it into effectively one word*. So “Johnnies-come-lately” may not be preferred but I don’t think it could be counted as grammatically wrong.
*This would make a great question for Susie Dent to answer. I may send it off to her and see what she says.
I can provide several cites that show both are acceptable (now that I’ve finally looked it up) and Google ngrams show both is pretty equivalent use. Looks like you’re making some mix of prescriptivist and descriptivist argument, which seems inconsistent.
The obvious comeback is that you don’t understand what a descriptivist argument is, if you think that.
But why don’t you provide the cites? Then we could examine who is saying they are acceptable and in what contexts. Without context we have nothing.
Merriam Webster online:
Grammarphobia blog:
(Quote: "Update, Jan. 19, 2015. A reader asks how to form the plural of “Johnny-come-lately.” All the standard dictionaries we’ve checked say that both “Johnny-come-latelies” and “Johnnies-come-lately” are OK. We like “Johnny-come-latelies.”)
Cambridge dictionary:
Just search for “plural” on the ones where I didn’t provide a quote and you’ll see that both are included.
I think it’s interesting that they change “lately” to “latelies” when creating the plural.
You were the one who simultaneously proclaimed that not inflecting “lately” would be “false pedanticism” and that “there is only usage”. And yet you said that before even waiting to determine which usages were common. Sure sounds like an unholy mix of prescriptivism and descriptivism to me.
If I can be so bold as to throw another wrench into this argument, what does everyone think the plural of “johnny-on-the-spot” should be? To me, “johnny-on-the-spots” sounds strange, and if I had to analyze I’d say that it sounds like the speaker is talking about a single proverbial johnny who occupies several spots. To my ears, “johnnies-on-the-spot” sounds more idiomatic.
To maybe put a different spin on “why?”:
I think that many people use “Johnny come latelies” because the term “Johnny come lately” a singular noun, whether this is actually correct or not. It’s then natural for people to pluralize the end of the term like other nouns.
Re: The OP’s other question, I think the same logic applies to “time-out”. The term is also used as a noun. So similarly, people naturally pluralize the end of the term. “I’ve gave my son several “time-outs” this week.”
With “Johnny on the spot” versus “Johnnies on the spot”, that one is tougher since that’s actually a brand name of a company. If I was the company, I’d want “Johnny on the spots” since that keeps the brand name intact. In Canada, as far as I know, that brand doesn’t exist. I’ve heard of it, but never heard its use here. Commonly I’ve heard & used the term “Porta-potty” which is pluralized to “Porta-potties”.
I’m laughing out loud at the idea of “portas potty”! 
I had no knowledge of it being a brand name, but the fact that it is is relevant for inflectional rules only if you’re a trademark lawyer (or someone writing for the company on their advice). No doubt Google’s trademark lawyers would like everyone to stop using “Google” as a verb, but that’s not going to stop millions of people around the world from cheerfully doing so anyway.
“Johnny-on-the-spot” was a generic phrase (meaning someone who’s always standing by to perform a service) long before some portable toilet distributor decided to trademark it. Its first known use was in the New York Sun in April 1896.
I’ve been doing some research into this.
Gardner’s Modern English Usage 3rd ed. 2009 has this to say:
It’s also mentioned under Plurals.
He also reminds me that the formal term for what I’ve been called false pedanticism is hypercorrection. He offers examples, especially of foreign words wrongly being pluralized. He also notes differences between common usage and academic usage.
Now, before someone tries to tinge me with the horrid pejorative of prescriptivism, let’s get back to usage. Dictionaries do **not **say what is acceptable. Have we learned nothing over the last 50 years? Dictionaries are descriptive, unless specifically stated. If dictionaries list Johnnies-come-lately as a plural, then there must be sufficient usage of the term for them to take notice. (More precisely, for one to take notice and for the others to slavishly copy, which all too often is the way modern dictionaries work.)
Who uses the terms and in what context? (The question I originally asked, the answer to which can’t be found in dictionaries.)
I checked Google and Google Books for hits. Sure enough, Johnnies-come-lately is used predominantly in more formal contexts and Johnny-come-latelies predominantly in common usage contexts. I deem the former to be a type of hypercorrection, but one that is acceptable because no one form has taken precedence.
That’s important. The term is sufficiently rare that almost any variant can be found. Johnnys come lately and Johnnies come lately, Johnny come latelys and Johnny comes latelies, and with hyphens and without hyphens. Eight variants of one phrase! Almost impossible to go wrong. Did I say eight? Karen H. Jobes in 1, 2, and 3 John, drops the capital J and puts forth johnnies-come-lately. I’ll bet we’ll see more lower case variants in the future.
Ngrams shows that the term peaked in popularity around 1970. The lower the usage the less pressure to conform to any one style. There’s no one proper answer to the OPs question: it depends on context. My *advice *is to follow both Gardner and the Grammarphobia link RitterSport gave and use Johnny-come-latelies. But it’s hard for anyone to convincingly accuse you of wrongness unless you typo Jonhny the way my fingers keep wanting to do.
I’m reminded of the *Onion *headline, “William Safire Orders Two Whoppers Junior”.