English or Greek Plural?

rogersgeorge on March 20th, 2024

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

Or should I say tentacloi?

Subscribe to this blog's RSS feed

Is “Family” Singular or Plural?

rogersgeorge on January 2nd, 2024

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…

Normally You Don’t Use an Apostrophe to Make a Plural

rogersgeorge on November 10th, 2023

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.

The Issue is S-V Agreement

rogersgeorge on August 28th, 2023

Or maybe disagreement. In English we have sepaate verb forms for connection with singular or plural nouns. Plural verb goes with plural nouns, singular with singular. First panel:

The verb is “comes,” which is the singular form. but we have two girls, clearly a plural. Wrong verb. I kind of apologize to our non-English-speaking friends that we use -s for the singular third person verb form and -s for the plurals of nouns.

A Plural of a Plural?

rogersgeorge on April 12th, 2023

Here’s how one guy, Zach Weinersmith, does it. Second panel. Only two panels appear here. Click the link to see the whole comic.

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/stars-war

It sounds wrong, but I’m not sure how else to do it. What’s your advice?