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Faldage #194201 11/22/10 12:10 PM
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Originally Posted By: Faldage
Sheep is only plural. The singular is shoop.

And the plural of book is beech. I hate it when people say books


Isn't beech the origin of the word rather than its plural? Writing material was often strips of beech because it kept the colour well and could be made quite thin. In my OED it has books as the plural or bookes (from Old English booke)

Last edited by bexter; 11/22/10 12:48 PM. Reason: singulars and plurals mixed up

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In OE the nominative singular was bōc and the nominative plural was bēċ. MnE book and beech are indeed related but they split off from each other before English was English if AHD4 is to be believed.

olly #194209 11/23/10 03:00 AM
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We loves Sheepses Ok--should I say TMI, or is this some brand of something I've never heard of?

Jackie #194211 11/23/10 01:28 PM
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or is this some brand of something I've never heard of?

He's riffing on the speech patterns of the character Gollum in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.


Ceci n'est pas un seing.
zmjezhd #194212 11/23/10 01:36 PM
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Great books (or beech if you prefer)

'what has it got in its pocketses?'


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Jackie #194218 11/23/10 08:30 PM
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Originally Posted By: Jackie
We loves Sheepses Ok--should I say TMI

You're looking at it from an OZ versus Kiwi banter POV.

Z, I'd never heard riff used that way, cool.

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Handel put it a little more grammatically in his We Like Sheep from The Messiah.

Faldage #194221 11/24/10 01:24 PM
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We Like Sheep

... and LOLcatz like cheezburgaz ... oh, and Bach's organ works ...


Ceci n'est pas un seing.
zmjezhd #194224 11/24/10 03:09 PM
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Oh how a comma changes the meaning!

We like sheep...
or
We, like sheep, ...

kah454 #194250 11/26/10 09:49 AM
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Only too true,
but what is it that we, like sheep do/have in common/like?


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