@mrcrow (above0
The ditty in question distinguishes only the feminine nouns of the Fourth declension in Latin and runs thusly:
“An anus left her domus with an acus in her manus and sat sewing 'neath the quercus on the Idus of July!”
“An old lady left her house with a needle in her hand and sat sewing under the oak tree on the Ides of July!”
PPC:)
The obvious answer is because we’re speaking English and the rules of Latin don’t apply to English. The question isn’t why do we pluralize campus as campuses; that’s just normal English. The question is why do we pluralize radius as radii?
And the other question is when will the board adopt some means of distinguishing old threads?
or a guy who is just a poor ol’ doofus
[Shawn Spencer]I’ve heard it both ways.[/SP]
[Burton Guster]No you haven’t, Shawn.[/BG]
That doesn’t stop people from trying:
Very good. And I don’t even know Latin.
Likewise, some fancier restaurants serve a single large raviolo as a starter. Not raviolus, which would be a much better word.
Incidentally should a single zombi(e) be a zombus?
And is a single oat, eaten as a snack, a granolum?
Take a cannolus. Leave the guns.
Nor do I, having deciding early on it’s not worth a fæx except to confuse people about whether we are correcting their English or their Latin.
Yes.
But what annoys me even more are people who have figured out that the plural of syllabus is syllabi and then go on to say things like “You can pick up a syllabi from that table next to the door.”
No! That’s singular. It’s like they want to show off their knowledge by using it as much as possible.
Along those lines, a frind of mine recently wrote “Whomever told you that …” Wy? Just because he knows about “whom” but isn’t sure when to use it?
The one that annoys me most often is “alumni”. No, I am not an alumni of Villanova University. I’m an alumnus, and a woman who went to school with me is an alumna (a group of which would be alumnae). If all that is too much to keep track of, just call any of us individually an alumn, or a group of us alumns, which neatly dispenses with the gender dichotomy, and pluralizes in the same way as other English words, which you learned in kindergarten.
Not to mention how annoying it is when you have to sort out “graduated Villanova,” “graduated from Villanova,” and “was graduated from Villanova” for those gushing over your accomplishment.
The fabulous thing about the inconsistencies of English is how readily it provides us opportunity to be superior to the less-educated.
Most days I am a pig in slop, wallowing in a cesspool of linguistic impropriety disgorged in limitless quantities by the ever more careless polloi. 
When monkeys fly out of my ass! IOW NEVER!!! :rolleyes:
Come on - this thread is in Latin. That not enough of a clue for ya?
First place, according to one style book I read, “It is never incorrect to make a plural of a borrowed word with -s or -es.” So “datums”, “phenomenons”, “calculuses” (one I’ve used when explaining that what we call calculus is really two calculuses and there are others), “mediums”, “alumnuses” (better that “alumni/alumnae” since ungendered), while unusual, are not wrong. And “campuses” and “buses” although the latter is a shortening of what originally began as a dative plural.
Notice that we do this only for Latin (and, rarely, Greek) words. We would not say “Schadenfreuden” (assuming that’s the correct German plural) would we?
One other point. If you insist on using the Latin plural, why do you use only the nominative plural? When used as an object, especially an indirect object, why don’t you use the dative plural? It makes no sense.
Meanwhile, hoodli are raising tantra in the cafeterium.
English isn’t consistent in its treatment of borrowed words. Those that were adopted later or used more in academia (especially scientific latin terms) tend to be pluralized more using their root language’s rules, than those that were adopted earlier or are used in more everyday settings.
I like the style guide suggestion that English pluralization forms are always acceptable. I’d prefer it if we’d Anglicize more borrowed terms and make life simpler.
I prefer to use data as a word like “sand”, where it’s taken as singular in spite of being a collection of individual grains. I find it more natural, since we almost never talk about a datum, and when we do we generally say “data point”. On this point, the data is unambiguous. 
[There’s a term for this kind of collective noun that I first saw here recently, but I can’t quite remember it.]
Podes 'n Boots.
We also do it for some Hebrew words, The only one that comes to mind immediately is goy/goyim, but there’s a number of others.
No, it makes sense. Except for pronouns, English doesn’t mark (inflect) words when used as objects, either direct, indirect, or prepositional. Marking borrowed nouns that way would actually violate English grammar. When I say grammar here, I mean the wiring in your head that lets you spout grammatical English on the fly. You’d have to rewire that to use such Latin inflections correctly without forethought.
The same thing for second person pronouns. Most people don’t realize it, but the word you originally was the plural accusative (direct object) form of the pronoun. The other forms were thee, ye (nominative), and thou (accusative singular), which everyone recognizes as archaic forms. But when people try to be archaic and use them, chances are they’ll use the wrong form. However, they’ll generally use the possessive forms thy and thine correctly, since there are analogous forms (your and yours) stll in English
One of my favourite jokes touches this subject, and is derived from supposed correspondence between two Oxford dons in the 1920s.
The first sends a note to the second: “would you like to pop around to discuss some interesting conundra arising from the maxima and minima of continua?”
The second replies: “It’s too nice a day to sit around on our ba doing sa.”
The Hebrew examples I was going to use were “Seraphim” and “Cherubim”, which I think are in broader use than “goyim”. Though of course English doesn’t have nearly as many Hebrew loanwords as Greek or Latin.
Actually, come to think of it, I can’t think of any examples of loanwords that pluralize as they do in Greek, either.