# Why is the hockey team called Maple Leafs not Maple Leaves? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 4, 2004, 8:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-hockey-team-called-maple-leafs-not-maple-leaves/232579 "2004-03-04T20:53:39Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 8
**Author:** ![suranyi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e36b37/32.png) [@suranyi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suranyi)\ **Post date:** [March 4, 2004, 10:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-hockey-team-called-maple-leafs-not-maple-leaves/232579/8 "2004-03-04T22:49:44Z")
Actually, there’s a good reason. Steven Pinker, the famous MIT linguistics professor, spends a few pages in one of his books explaining why “Maple Leafs” is correct, and more natural, than “Maple Leaves” in this context. It’s the same reason that we say that a baseball player “flied” out when he hits a pop fly, and not that he “flew” out, even though the normal past tense of “fly” is “flew”. The idea is this: If an irregular word is removed enough from its original meaning, often by going through different parts of speech, or by becoming part of a larger unit, it tends to become regular. In this context, a Maple Leaf is not a leaf at all; it’s a type of person. So it loses its connection with the irregular word “leaf”. Another way to put it is that it’s the whole phrase “Maple Leaf” which carries the meaning; it is no longer the noun “leaf” modified by the adjective “maple”. And noun phrases cannot be irregular. In the case of “flied” out, that comes from the noun phrase “a fly ball”. When the verb “to fly” is made into part of a noun, and then reconverted into a verb, it becomes regular. Another example Pinker gives: If I were to say, “That person is a real Mickey Mouse”, meaning that I think he’s stupid, how would I make the sentence plural? If I said, “Those people are real Mickey Mice”, it sounds very strange. It’s more natural to say, “Those people are real Mickey Mouses”. This isn’t because of some rule of grammar. It’s (according to Pinker) because of the way the brain handles language. Ed --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-is-the-hockey-team-called-maple-leafs-not-maple-leaves/232579)._