Onesies and Twosies—getting plurals right

rogersgeorge on February 28th, 2010

Not just any old plurals, either. You know all about ordinary plurals. Several words tend to trip up the educated (read pretentious), especially those in the upper echelons of business.

Incident—an event, especially if it’s remarkable in some way. This word takes a perfectly ordinary plural: “incidents.” Do not burden your listener (or reader) with the Latinized and incorrect “incidences.”

Process—another one the boss lies to Latinize. The plural is perfectly ordinary: processes (‘pra-sess-uz), not procesese, or procesees (pra-sess-’eeze), or however you spell it.

Phenomena— This is the plural! The singular is “phenomenon.”

Data—neither a robot nor a singular. The singular is datum. This distinction is disappearing, and you see it mainly in scientific literature, but figure on maintaining the distinction in any context where you need to refer to a single datum.

Some words tell you whether to use the singular or plural. “Every,” for example, always refers to a singular. I found this one in the wild: “…has crossed every t’s and dotted every i’s…” I leave the fixing of that one as an exercise for the reader.

Got any pet peeve plurals of your own? Do the curmudgeonly thing and comment.

P.S. The title of this post is an expression used in purchasing departments, referring to the purchase of small numbers of items rather than large lots.

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Side by side or parallel?

rogersgeorge on February 20th, 2010

A lot of times we write about two things at once. That’s why we have “and.” Here’s a little trick that will make your writing more logical when you write about two things.
When you have two of something, they should be of the same grammatical type. We call this parallelism.
Here’s an example of how not [...]

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Redundancy is a no-no

rogersgeorge on February 17th, 2010

Redundancy is when you say (write) something twice that needs to be said only once.
The test for redundancy is to remove one of the candidates. Does the meaning change? If no, then you have a redundancy. Redundancies are easy to miss because you have to be paying attention to what you are saying to catch [...]

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Fancy and plain quotes

rogersgeorge on January 8th, 2010

Word processors have advanced a lot since I started out in computing (a 64K Color Computer, on which I taught myself BASIC). When you type a quotation mark, the big word processors figure out which direction to make the curly quotes.  Text editors and other simple word processors generally use the simpler straight quotes.
Aside: I [...]

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In the Bible or not?

rogersgeorge on January 7th, 2010

Lots of people like to quote the Bible. Unfortunately, lots of people like to quote some old saw and say it’s from the Bible. Now you certainly have permission to repeat old saws, but don’t betray your illiteracy by making the wrong attribution.
Here are a few aphorisms (fancy word for old saw) that lots of [...]

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