The Careful Communicator and Foreign Plurals

To the extent that foreign plurals create problems for native English speakers, the root of the difficulty is quite clear: the teaching of foreign languages in our schools seems to have declined even faster than the teaching of English composition. The result: a great many people today can’t distinguish singular and plural forms in any foreign language except Spanish (which is easy, since it just calls for adding an s, the same as in English).

Of course, with most languages our lack of familiarity with singular and plural forms doesn’t matter much; the main problems involve words from Greek and Latin. Here are a few examples to remind the careful communicator. Some of these terms seem to give certain folks a lot of trouble; others don’t.

The most common symptom of the problem is a foreign plural used with a singular English verb; when a word has no final s, people assume it must be singular. Not too many years back, most educated souls knew that a medium is a substance or agency by means of which something is transmitted or accomplished: an aqueous medium (water) or a medium of exchange (money). Then we began to talk about news media, meaning that there are several (radio, TV, the print press, and now the Internet). “News media” was soon shortened to the media, at which point folks began to say, “The media is . . .” How long before we start hearing “There are several medias involved . . .”?

This process of word transformation has happened before. Today surely everyone can refer to agendas without worrying that agenda began as the plural of agendum (a thing to be done). Not so far along in this process is data; to the dismay of some careful communicators, it is now widely accepted as a synonym for information, and therefore used with a singular verb. Moreover, the singular form datum has taken on a distinct, specialized meaning of its own for topographers, geoscientists, and others.

If you want to be really careful, you can start looking out for Italian singular and plural forms. Graffiti is plural; it means “little scratchings.” A single scrawl is a graffito. Cognoscenti (those in the know) is plural; the singular turns out to be cognoscente (one who knows).

Let us be thankful that a lot of imported words have been around long enough to take standard English plurals, and no one will raise an eyebrow when you say (or write) formulas instead of formulae (in fact, the latter now sounds a bit affected). In the same way, we have accepted gymnasiums instead of gymnasia and appendixes alongside of appendices—while vacuums has entirely replaced vacua. Evidently a lot depends on how an anglicized plural sounds. Probably most people would avoid stimuluses; some would shun octopuses; but few, I suspect, would be upset by cactuses.

Finally, there are still a few Old English plurals hanging around, such as mice and oxen; mouses and oxes may some day replace them, expedited by our familiarity with houses and blouses, boxes and foxes. On the other hand, no one has suggested using childs to replace children, nor womans to replace women. One might say that women are irreplaceable.