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#11646 12/02/00 06:57 AM
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In reply to:

Sheep too

And I thought it was only the New Zealanders who brought "sheep" into every conversation.


Et ewe, Anna? I am sick and tired of people ramming sheep jokes down my throat at aevery opportunity, and I won't put tup with it any more - I refuse to have a baa of it. It's shear rudeness, wether you think so or not.




#11647 12/02/00 12:46 PM
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Annastrophic wrote:

And I thought it was only the New Zealanders who brought "sheep" into every conversation

Ah well, New Zealand is a great place to live. 40 million sheep can't be wrong, can they? Trouble is, you get fleeced by everyone and have the wool pulled over your eyes at every opportunity. Along with bad puns. But it's all a bit of a dag ...



The idiot also known as Capfka ...
#11648 12/02/00 08:02 PM
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And I thought it was only the New Zealanders who brought "sheep" into every conversation.

That's only because the Welsh don't talk about it.



mav, we're waiting!







#11649 12/02/00 08:13 PM
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Is opera the other onliest word's got its own plural when it's already a plural?

Nope, trust me to note that fish is its own plural, but talking about fishes ain't restricted to kids.

One from a pool of FishesonBikes


P.S. Nice to meet you Faldage.



#11650 12/02/00 09:12 PM
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Can the word HAIR be classified as it's own plural. You say HAIRS in some circumstances (eg. there were two hairs in my soup) and HAIR in others (he has a full head of hair).


#11651 12/04/00 03:51 AM
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In reply to:

Is opera the other onliest word's got its own plural when it's already a plural?


Although I wouldn't have expressed the question in quite those words, I understood Faldage to be making a distinction between "got its own plural" and "is its own plural", i.e. that opera (works) is the plural of opus (a work), but opera is also used in the singular sense of a musical drama, for which the plural is, presumably, operas, as in "I have seen three operas this year." Interestingly enough, although explicit in their listing of the two senses of opera, the online dictionaries were strangely silent on the plural of "an opera". It appears that a Latin plural has become an Italian singular??

Agenda is a word that is a plural (of agendum), but is often pluralized itself to agendas. The latter smacks of misuse of Latin to me, but some dictionaries seem to have accepted it. dictionary.com tries to justify it like this: http://www.dictionary.com/cgi-bin/dict.pl?term=agendas
(I even found the repugnant "agendums"!)

Doubtless there are other similar -um/-a/-as examples.

And humble apologies, Faldage, if I have misrepresented you.


#11652 12/04/00 11:14 AM
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In reply to:

Can the word HAIR be classified as it's own plural. You say HAIRS in some circumstances (eg. there were two hairs in my soup) and HAIR in others (he has a full head of hair).


Not really. English, thank goodness, doesn't bother with noun genders much, but the difference between countable nouns and uncountable nouns (aka mass nouns) is crucial. For example pig is countable (1 pig, 2 pigs), pork is uncountable (and so has no plural). Some nouns can be either depending on the exact meaning, e.g. paper (the substance) is uncountable, but paper (= document) is countable (She threw the papers into the air in despair). Similarly hair can mean an (uncountable) collection or mass (I ran my fingers through his hair absentmindedly) or a (countable) item (He found two blond hairs floating in the soup).

Bingley



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#11653 12/04/00 01:11 PM
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So whaddaya wanna do tonight?

And would sheep be an infinitely regressive plural?

Fish is the plural of a single species, e.g., three lake trout is three fish, fishes is used when the individual are of different species, e.g., a lake trout, a muskie and a rainbow trout would be three fishes. Naw, that doesn't taste right (thanks, xara, I like that phrase). Fishes is more generic. Lake trout, muskie and rainbow trout are three fishes


#11654 12/04/00 03:39 PM
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Not just opera and agenda, but what about the current corruption: media used as a singular (and then, even worse, ofttimes developing a 'regular' plural: medias).

And what about the word people, which is, in general, a non-countable (yet plural) word, and can itself be pluralised: "the peoples of southern India tend to share a fondness for coconut milk as a cooking medium."


#11655 12/04/00 06:43 PM
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Welcome, Faldage! Sorry belated--been an unwilling prisoner in the land of no connectivity again.

Okay--if you've read much of this Board in older threads, you already know my mind wanders to the gutter pretty easily, so I have to ask: you said:
So whaddaya wanna do tonight?

And would sheep be an infinitely regressive plural?


Does the first statement lead into (ooh, Baaa-ad, Jackie!)
the second?

Also--speaking of gutter: revealing yet more of my ignorance--I just found out from an article that that statement from an old post about lying in the gutter but looking up at the stars is on Oscar Wilde's statue.

Also--I am convinced that three different kinds of fish are still fish.
--------------------------------------------------------

shanks, you put: "the peoples of southern India tend to share a fondness for coconut milk as a cooking medium."

Have the media been informed of this?










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