A Word with a Tricky Plural

English borrows a lot of words from other languages, and sometimes we also borrow the foreign plural form, and sometimes not. So sometimes we don’t know! Here’s an example.

Of course I’m not going to tell you the answer (this time); go look it up.

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Same issue as the previous post. Last word in the caption.

Should be “closely,” but you knew that, right? This error is pretty common, and it might become accepted eventually.

I suspect the cartoonist deliberately named the repeat offender “Pete.”

Third panel. The adverb usage of “good” happens to be incorrect. We have an averb for that usage! (It’s “well,” but you knew that, right?)

“Skate good” is wrong because in this sentence “to skate” is a verb. “Good skater” is correct because “skater” is a noun.

English is a tricky language because many words can have more than one function, but this isn’t an example of that.

—but it’s a bit tricky to read, so in that respect its a bad lesson. Read the first two panels going down, then the tall one in the middle, then the last two going down.

So being concise is good, being tricky is bad. I admit the latter applies more to comics than narrative text.

I mentioned this before, but the lesson is worth repeating. (Use the search box on the right to see more of these.) First speech in the last panel:

He said “boss’s.” That’s three of the same letter in a row, forbidden in English except for onomonopoetic words such as “booom” and “screeeech!”

In fact, if the word you want to make posessive already ends in “s,” use only the apostrophe. So if you want to posessiveize a word such as “books,” The posessive would be “books’.”