I’m sure there’s a linguistic or etymological reason, but I don’t happen to know it. Do you? Think Chief and Leaf.

If you do know why, put it in the comments.

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What is it when you refer to a single group of many? I say it’s still a plural, so I say this headline is incorrect:

Children are expensive – not just for parents, but the environment – so how many is too many?

Should be “how many are too many?”

That’s in a newsletter named The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/children-are-expensive-not-just-for-parents-but-the-environment-so-how-many-is-too-many-176662

Here’s the picture behind the headline:

Which do you prefer? The orange critter is an octopus with awfully short tentacles.

Or should I say tentacloi?

I’ll let you decide on this one. Here’s what stimulated my question:

Using the plural verb “know” just doesn’t feel right, but a family typically has more that one person in it…

The apostrophe goes with posessive forms, but an exception exists—acronyms use an apostrophe before the pluralizing “s” if you need it to be clearer. In this strip, it’s all uppercase, so the apostrophe is appropriate. Last panel, last word.

If this were normal upper-lowercase writing you would have CEOs, which is okay.