Onesies and Twosies—getting plurals right

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.