English or Greek Plural?
Which do you prefer? The orange critter is an octopus with awfully short tentacles.
Or should I say tentacloi?
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Is “Family” Singular or Plural?
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
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
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?
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?