The plural of “ox” is “oxen.” Try saying “oxes” out loud, and it sounds weird because we’re not used to it. But we say “boxes” and “foxes” (are there any other words that end with “ox”?)
Why exactly did the plural of “ox” come to be “oxen?” And why the plural of “fox” is not “foxen?”
Because the english language is weird.
Oh and what would the plural of Angelina Jolie’s son named Maddox?
Around the time of Chaucer, before the dialect of London was established as “standard” English, there were several forms vying for dominance. I believe in the Northern form -en was the standard plural. The Southern form (the dialect of Chaucer and London) formed the plural in -es. Eventually the -en form lost the battle and today it only survives in a very few words (oxen, brethren and children being the most common, though children had to fight it out with yet another dialect’s plural, childer). Now whether foxes used to be foxen back in the day and got assimilated or whether it came direct from the -es group, I don’t know.
Well, we do have vixen. And, for those users of DEC machines, I’ve seen the plural Vaxen.
Interestingly enough, though, only the plural form survives. Not the origin of vixen.
See also this thread:
And from John Mace’s cite, I see I mixed up which dialect was which… :smack:
A lot of pretentious Slashdot geeks like to say “boxen” when they’re referring to computers.
As a side note, I just finished reading The Unfolding of Language (which I highly recommend, btw), and the author points out that plurals like man -> men and goose -> geese may look like a simple vowel change plural forming process, but it’s more complicated than that. He postulates that man (originally mann) went thru a stage where the plural was mann-iz (the -iz sound being common in I-E plurals) but that the “i” began to color the “a” (think of German umlaut where an “e” colors a vowel), turning it to “e”, and that the “z” was dropped off at some point. So, the plural of “man” started out as a simple plural process of adding “-iz”, but turned into a vowel change instead. Apparently the same thing happened in German, but to a much larger extent, leaving more of those plural forms than one finds in English.
Both words come from German. In German:
Ox = Ochse
Oxen = Ochsen
Fox = Fuchs
Foxes = Füchse
So I’d attribute it to the inherited vagaries of the German language.
Vixen appears to come from German füchsin “female fox”.
As does most of the English language (from Germanic languages, rather.) Is this -en common for all pluralisations in Germanic languages, or is it just an odd example?
En is a very common plural, but not the only one. Just -e is also a common pluralisation. I think it depends on the gender of the word and the word structure.
In *vixen * the ending -en is not a plural form. It’s the nearest pronounciation of German füchsin in which -in indicates a feminin form: Fuchs (male), Füchsin (female).
Pretentious? It is to laugh!
Seriously, the usage isn’t pretentious. Neither is Slashdot.
The site itself isn’t, but there are certainly pretentious people on Slashdot. You know, the ones whose response to every Windows bug or DRM scare is “So what? It doesn’t affect me. I use Linux, listen to nothing but indie-label music, and watch nothing but Red vs. Blue. Maybe this will finally get everyone to switch to the things I like.” IME, those are the types who are most likely to say “boxen”.
And of course the worse thing that could possibly happen to them would be to wake up one morning to find that everyone has switched to things they like. Then they wouldn’t be special anymore and would have to find new obsessions.
I’d never heard ‘boxen’. But now I plan to use it all the time, to as many people as possible, in the hope that Bill Gates may catch on to it one day. Then no-one will ever want to use it again.
Since this is GQ:
http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/b/boxen.html
Hackers that get their hacker cred from memorizing the jargon file (which, unlike some subcultures, is actually not an inherently pretentious way to acquire it), also use the term.