I’m not much of a hockey fan, but something I’ve been wondering about… why do the Toronto Maple Leafs call themselves the Leafs? Shouldn’t it be Toronto Maple Leaves???
dqa
June 8, 2001, 1:42am
3
Likewise, the plural of Marlin should be Marlin. You’d think that with as much money as they blew to get the franchise, they could hire a proofreader.
The answer is pretty simple, actually; it sounds better as a nickname. The Maple Leafs were renamed that by owner Conn Smythe in 1927; they had previously been the “Toronto St. Patricks,” which is pretty horrible.
Smythe chose the name simply because “Maple Leafs” sounds better than “Maple Leaves” as a name for a sports team, and anyway, they’re named after the symbol, not the leaf.
Steven Pinker answers this question in The Language Instinct (pg 145).
As for the Maple Leafs, the noun being pluralized is not leaf , the unit of foliage, but a noun based on the name Maple Leaf, Canada’s national symbol. A name is not the same thing as a noun. (For example, whereas a noun may be preceded by an article like the , a name may not be: you cannot refer to someone as the Donald , unless you are Ivana Trump, whose first langauge is Czech.) Therefore, the noun a Maple Leaf (referring to, say, the goalie) must be headless, because it is a noun based on a word that is not a noun. And a noun that does not get its nounhood from one of its components cannot get an irregular plural from that component either; hence it defaults to the regular form Maple Leafs .
[He points out that this also applies to the Marlins]
I’m sick of dealing with all the Mickey Mouses in this administration. (not Mickey Mice )the Childs are great cooks. (not the Children )
This is a paraphrase, but I steal his examples:
Normal compound words like overshoot and workman have heads (shoot and man ) that control what kind of words they are and how to conjugate or pluralize them. Words like low-life and Walkman are headless; a low-life is neither a low nor a life (discuss). It’s a person. So, it doesn’t get any special rules from life and pluralizes the generic way: low-lifes .
Read this book and The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language and you’ll know pretty much everything there is to know about language.