Perplexing Plurals: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
Part of what you know when you know a language is how to make your words fit into a grammatical system. This can be fairly simple, as in English (the odd -s here, the odd -ed there) or fairly complex, as in the Russian case system. One thing all systems have in common though, is that they work all the time. For every singular, there is a plural.<ref>
▲Part of what you know when you know a language is how to make your words fit into a grammatical system. This can be fairly simple, as in English (the odd -s here, the odd -ed there) or fairly complex, as in the Russian case system. One thing all systems have in common though, is that they work all the time. For every singular, there is a plural.<ref> This is, of course, not true. Even in languages with a straightforward singular/plural distinction, there are always things like [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurale_tantum "scissors" or "pants"], or [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_noun "stuff"])</ref> It might be regular (trope, tropes) or irregular (goose, geese), but you know it's there and you know what it is.
...until you find yourself needing to talk about octopuses...octopus...octopi- no, [[Dog Latin|that's Latin]]...octopodes? Ugh, now this is going to bother me all day.
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[[Truth in Television]]. Related to the phenomenon of "paradigmatic gapping" in [[Real Life]], where a grammatical form that logically should exist just...doesn't.
Note: This is crucially not a trope used by [[Funny Foreigner
▲Note: This is crucially not a trope used by [[Funny Foreigner|Funny Foreigners]]. It is confusion about a speaker's '''own language''' (and the need to stop and work it out) and usually not caused by ignorance or [[Book Dumb]] (although expect a character beset by [[Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness]] to be immune).
▲{{examples|Examples}}
== Fan Works ==
* In ''[http://sam-storyteller.dreamwidth.org/2005/07/10/ Cartographer's Craft]'', a ''[[Harry Potter]]'' fanfic by copperbadge, Hermione insists on using "Horcruces" as the plural of "Horcrux" instead of "Horcruxes", to everyone else's chagrin.
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== [[Literature]] ==
* In ''[[
{{quote|
2. Unexplainable Phenomenons. Phenomenatrices. Phenomenice. Things, ye ken well what I mean. }}
* Since the climax of ''[[The Pyrates]]'' occurs at the aptly-named Octopus Rock, the inevitable confusion ensues. Antihero Colonel Blood uses the incorrect Latinate plural "octopi," and smarmy hero Captain Avery offers him the correct (though antiquated) Greek "octopods" or "octopodes." Largely out of contrariness, Blood elects to go with "octopussies."
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* ''[[The Brady Bunch]]'': The [[B Plot]] of the episode "The Personality Kid" concerns Bobby & Cindy going ape-shit over safety. The following concerns some electrical outlets in the kitchen, which have so many extensions & multi-prongs plugged in that one is referred to as an "octopus."
{{quote|
Carol: Now I hope these are the right plugs.
Bobby: Just the kind the teacher said to get instead of that old octopus.
Alice: Do you know that all last night I dreamed about octopuses?...Octopussys?...Octopi? }}
* In ''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'', Riley comments that, after falling in with the main characters, he suddenly finds himself needing to know the plural of "apocalypse".
** In another episode the Trio kept stumbling over the plural of "nemesis." Became a [[Brick Joke]] when a vampire the next season said it was "nemeses," which Buffy noted.
* The girls of ''[[
* There is a variant of this in ''[[Arrested Development (TV series)|Arrested Development]]'' (subverted maybe?). GOB is dense enough that he think he can avoid using an "S" by switching to a different plural noun. GOB has just chipped a tooth and is now whistling his S's:
{{quote|
== [[Music]] ==
* Used in the [[Novelty Song]] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oOzszFIBcE "I Want a Hippopotomus for Christmas
{{quote|
''Only a hippopotamus will do
''No crocodiles or rhinoceroseses
''I only like hippopotamuseses
''And hippopotamuses like me too! }}
* The [[Allan Sherman]] song "One Hippopotami" (a [[Song Parody|parody]] of "What Kind Of Fool Am I?") is half this trope and half "pair" puns.
{{quote|
''Because one hippopotami is two hippopotamus
''And if you have two goose, that makes one geese
''A pair of mouse is mice, a pair of moose is meese }}
== [[Tabletop Games]] ==
* The Tyranids in ''[[Warhammer 40
** ...[[Completely Missing the Point|Bad news]]?
* In ''[[Magic:
== [[Video Games]] ==
* ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]'' tends to have a lot of fun with plurals, with "box" becoming "boxen", "kiwi" becoming "kiwus", "fruit basket" becoming [[Fruits Basket|"fruits basket"]], and "liar's pants" becoming [[The Lord of the Rings|"liar's pantses, precious"]].
** "Boxen", at least, comes directly from old computing culture—see ''Jokes/Real Life'' below.
* Nobody in the ''[[Free Space]]'' fandom is sure what the plural of "Sathanas" is supposed to be (given that it's an ancient name for [[Satan]], it probably doesn't have one). The game itself avoids the issue by always referring to that ship class as a "Sathanas juggernaut".
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* In the ''[[Phineas and Ferb]]'' episode "Greece Lightning", the narrator of an educational filmstrip is unsure how to refer to [[Everythings Better With Platypus|platypi]]. Platypuses. Platypeople?
==
* Some Russian jokes deal with the unpredictable nature of Russian plural nouns. An example from [[Wikipedia]]:
{{quote|
* There's an old Italian joke where a man doesn't know if the plural for "Belga" (a person from Belgium) is "Belghi" or "Belgi". He eventually resorts to write down "Un Belga. Anzi due!" (One Belgian. I mean, two.)
* [[Brian Regan]] has an entire routine built around this trope. It starts with "boxen" (like oxen) of donuts and just snowballs from there.
** Richard Lederer's "[
* There's a joke about someone shipping a pair of mongooses to a zoo and being unsure of what the plural of "mongoose" is. They start out writing a note referring them to "mongooses", then try "mongeese", and eventually resort to writing "Enclosed is the mongoose you ordered. Also enclosed is the other mongoose you ordered".
* [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/boxen.html "Boxen"] goes back to the Elder (pre-home-computer) Days of computing culture (as documented in the [[Jargon File]]), when one would build a computer out of various components, each in its own box. As for brands of computers, there was the VAX - if you had more than one, you'd refer to your [http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/V/VAXen.html VAXen].
----
{{spoiler|Incidentally: '''''Octopodes'''''. It's from the Greek.}}
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