What Is the Plural of “Mongoose”?

Read the comic. I deliberately didn’t look it up.

Shame on me. Look it up yourself.

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You probably get this right, but it jumped out at me, so I thought I’d point it out. It’s a headline:

Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota sets June date for office return; CEO says flexibility will be key

At first I expected the plural form of the verb, “set,”but everybody knows that Blue Cross and Blue Shield is a single company, so the singular verb, “sets” is appropriate.

Easy lesson today.

The singular is “datum.”

I mentioned this point about the word data before; I’m repeating because the article is worth reading. It’s about a treatment for drug addiction, called contingency management, that appears to be rather effective. Here’s the goof:

Early data suggests that overdoses have increased even more during the coronavirus pandemic, which has forced most treatment programs to move online.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/health/meth-addiction-treatment.html

Note the singular verb.

Sorry, I don’t have a good drug addiction picture.

Okay, “bacterium” is the word for a single bacterial cell. “Bacteria” is the general term for a bunch of those cells, especially if you’re referring to one species, but the word can apply to more than one species, too.

But what if you’re referring to more than one individual cell of bacteria? Here are a couple sentences that made me wonder:

There’s a Reason Why Bacterias Can’t Be Fat or Skinny
Bacterias are seemingly the same size wherever you go. While there are exceptions that vary in size from 1 to 10 micrometers (µm), most bacterias fall somewhere between 0.5 to 2 µm.

https://interestingengineering.com/theres-a-reason-why-bacterias-cant-be-fat-or-skinny

My spell checker even flagged it.

I suppose it’s correct. Maybe “bacteriums.” What do you think?

Some things can be both singular and plural. My brain is singular, but my brains are inside my skull. Except for number, the terms are pretty much interchangeable.

Here’s an unrelated of something being plural, but we treat it as singular.

From the ages and sizes of animals, archaeologists can deduce the populations of herds in terms of age and sex ratios, all of which reveals how herding differed from hunting.

https://aeon.co/essays/revolutionary-archaeology-reveals-the-deepest-possible-anthropocene

Okay, we have lots of plurals here: ages and sizes, archaeologists, populations, herds, age and sex ratios. But we have a singular verb, reveals! Why? Because they got combined into a single group, all.

American English does this a lot. “Team” is singular, and other collective nouns. The British don’t. (Hmm. Here I have an apparently singular word, “British,” but it’s a plural.) I feel sorry for people who have to learn English.

Sorry, I don’t have a good picture to go with this lesson. How do you picture something that’s simultaneously singular and plural?

All that said, I found a goof in the same article:

The increasingly sophisticated use and analysis of ancient DNA now allows researchers to track the development and distribution of domesticated animals and crops in great detail.

In this case we have a compound subject, which counts as a plural, even if the elements of the compound are singular. So they should have a plural verb, “allow,” not “allows.” Harrumpf.