Confusing plurals

In this episode, the fourth of this series, I’m looking at some words that have singular and plural forms that are very different. These lead to a lot of confusion as we’ll see.

I also want to look at the way that English is evolving in some very strange and apparently senseless ways!

Personal note: I notice I started preparing this show in 2019; unfortunately, COVID messed up my productivity for the next two years, but I hope I can now begin to be productive again!

Nouns ending in “…is”

These words usually derive from Greek. This means they don’t conform to the usual English pattern of writing singulars and plurals.

Some examples: thesis, parenthesis, crisis, nemesis, axis.

• A mistake often made with these words is that people put es on the end of the singular form to make plurals, thus thesises. The rule here is that the is at the end is replaced by es. I included thesis’ with a possessive apostrophe on the end because I have seen this - someone very confused between unusual plurals and possessives.

• The mistaken assumption that the plural parentheses must have a singular form parenthese error is remarkably common. The thinking seems to be that just removing the final s from the plural makes it singular.

• I just watched a YouTube video where the presenter made the axis → axe error, so that one is out there too.

Nouns ending in “…a”

These are irregular plurals which (formally) end with "ae"¹. Some examples follow. The plurals in italics are alternatives which are not used in formal contexts but have become accepted in informal ones:

There are other plurals that are confusing of course. As a Biology student I encountered words like proboscis (a Greek-derived word meaning a feeding tube such as an insect mouthpart or an elephant’s trunk). We were taught that the plural was proboscides, though nowadays proboscises is acceptable.

I’ll leave this subject here though - at least for the moment.

Some recent language evolution

There are two things I wanted to mention here, both of which I find strange, and being somewhat superannuated myself, don’t approve of:

The use of “is is”

You will hear people saying, for example: “The problem is is that it’s snowing.” Finding this construction written is rare (in my experience) but it is common in speech on TV and radio.

I recall people writing to the BBC to ask why speakers were doubling the word “is” and the response being it was just a common hesitation. That was not a good reply since now it’s everywhere and surely cannot be a verbal tic.

The sentence: “The question is, is it snowing?” is acceptable of course. The first “is” ends the phrase and the second starts the question.

See the references below discussing this oddity.

“Honing in”

This expression seems to be mishearing or mispronunciation of the phrase “Home in”. I’m not sure if this is a Mondegreen but if not, it should be!

There is a rather poor excuse that since “hone” means to sharpen or narrow (to a point) this is acceptable. I don’t find this acceptable myself, because otherwise we’d have:

• Honing missiles
• Honing pigeons
• Sharpening in

Also, “homing”, “honing” and “sharpening” would be synonyms, and there would be expressions such as “The detective was sharpening in on the criminal.”

In such a world I would be leaving my blunt chisels out on the bird table in the hopes a “honing pigeon” would pass by and sharpen them.

Links

• Plural of thesis:
  • Grammar Monster
    • This link has some good advice for dealing with weird plurals, though some you just have to remember, there are no rules!

• Irregular plurals which end with "ae" (or "æ"):
  • Wiktionary
    • This is a list of these plurals, 159 of them at the time of writing. Many of these are obsolete however.

• The “is is” problem:
  • StackExchange: Why do some people say “the reason is is that,” with “is” twice in a row?
  • GrammarBook.com: What Is-Is Is, Is Exasperating
  • Wikipedia article on the Double Copula

• “Honing in”:
  • Merriam-Webster: hone in
  • Me Ears Are Alight old British advertisement

• Previous episodes in this series:
  • Battling with English - part 1
  • Battling with English - part 2
  • Battling with English - part 3