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:

Massive meteoroid strike on Mars creates 500-feet wide crater, unearths boulder-sized blocks of water ice.

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:

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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.

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.

So there you have it!

Here are two pictures. I googled them. You’ve probably seen something like these:

Here’s the sentence. Think about the highlighted verbs before you read what’s below.

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?

Some words can go either way. “Fish,” for example can mean more than one of the critters; but you can also say “fishes,” particularly if you’re referring to more than one kind.

Here’s another critter that can go either way. The lady behind the counter gets the distinction.

• Use “shrimp” when you refer to the ocean-going crustacean. “I had a dozen shrimp for dinner.”
• Use “shrimps” when you’re referring to more than one small human. “We fourth-graders are shrimps compared to those seniors.”

Do any other double-form plurals come to mind?