A Plural of a Plural?
Here’s how one guy, Zach Weinersmith, does it. Second panel. Only two panels appear here. Click the link to see the whole comic.
It sounds wrong, but I’m not sure how else to do it. What’s your advice?
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Adjectives in English
Unlike many languages, adjectives in English say almost nothing about the words they modify. Not gender, and not number. Adjectives don’t say whether the word they refer to is plural, so we don’t have a plural form for adjectives. Here’s an incorrect sentence from an astronomy article:
https://interestingengineering.com/science/meteoroid-strike-mars-water-ice
So it’s a “500-foot wide crater.” Adjectives stay singular. Harrumpf.
Here’s a picture:
When to use an apostrophe to make a plural
Part of good writing is to be unambiguous. Sometimes you need an apostrophe to make a plural sound right. See the last word in this comic:
The apostrophe makes you pronounce it “prose” which is plural of “pro.” Without the apostrophe, it’s “pros,” which you might be inclined to pronounce “pross.”
This doesn’t happen very often. When I run into another example, I’ll post it.
A Plural I Never Thought About
The word “cochlea” is like the word “fish.” Singular and plural are the same. Here’s the text that made me think of this. It’s from Scientific American December 2022, page 46.
The primary structure of hearing in the skull is called a cochlea. Both of your cochlea would fit on the face of a dime with room to spare. If your cochlea were the same relative size as a bat’s, each would be about the size of a golf ball.
So there you have it!
Here are two pictures. I googled them. You’ve probably seen something like these:
It Could be Wrong or It Could be Right
Here’s the sentence. Think about the highlighted verbs before you read what’s below.
The blizzard of reports, studies, and press releases that always accompanies a COP means that important developments can get buried.
https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/the-never-ending-cop
Okay, “accompanies” and “means” are singular verbs. What might be their subject or subjects?
“Accompanies” is close to “reports, studies, and press releases,” but that’s a plural! So “blizzard,” a singular, has to be the subject. The blizzard accompanies a COP.
What about “means”? Looks like “blizzard has to be its subject, too. So the blizzard accompanies and means something. Awkward, but technically it could be grammatical.
But what about that nice list? You could say that they accompany a COP, especially since they’re objects of a preposition with a relative clause right after it.
I think if the list did the accompanying and the blizzard should mean something gets buried; after all, it’s a blizzard!
What’s your opinion?
