The English language
I've said it before but it needs repeating - the English language is a right swine. With such an mish-mash of languages we not only have different words that mean the same thing, but different words that almost mean the same thing but not quite.
Oh yes there are rules, but then there are exceptions to the rules which in themselves don't appear logical and somehow these all get filtered into our heads at an early age. As for spelling, yeesh (or sheesh) don't get me started, with the same number of languages sticking their oars in it's not enough to know how a letter is pronounced by itself, it's not even even to know how it is pronounced in conjunction with other letters, you have to know how it's pronounced in that very word; yep it's nice in Nice.
As such I try to ignore spelling mistakes with only the occasional wince at a particularly egregious example and likewise the odd mix-up of terms, or with the drift of language a term now used in a different reference. But there is one that for some reason just causes me to tense up - the plural dice being used to refer to the singular die. It's a die, it's a damn die.
Maybe it's just because die in common parlance is death, but damn it it's die there's no such thing as "a dice".
7 comments:
I've said it before but it needs repeating; Fowler's 3rd Ed puts it best: "The small cubes with faces bearing 1-6 spots used in games of chance are the 'dice' (pl.); and one of them is also called a 'dice'."
A 'die' is a kind of metal cutting tool used, for example, for making threads on bolts, and its plural is 'dice', and this is the origin of the phrase "the die is cast". Confusing a die with a dice is a very common mistake, but it's one that always makes me wince, not least because it almost always takes the form of incorrecting someone else's words.
According to my old math textbook, “die” is an abbreviation fo r“dice” (which is singular).
This is almost as absurd as Unix abbreviating “copy” to just “cp”…
As I said it's really just about the only thing that truly gets me frothing and I don't know why, perhaps it's the role-playing background?
Just this morning I was a few cars behind a truck with "I'm Jam Tart" written on the back 'Hello Jam Tart you must have had strange parents'.
“Data” is the plural of “datum”.
“Media” is the plural of &ldquomedium”.
And the reason you'll never find a happy medium is that they all talk to the dead…
Agenda - Agendum; not so much though as you could say that each point is in itself an agendum (thing to be done), therefore the entire list is an agenda (things to be done) though of course that means there's no such thing as agendas it's still an agenda.
In Slow Food a local group is called a Convivium and the plural ia Convivia. I was told it is from its Latin roots.
Yep for second declension neuter nominative terms -um is singular, -a is plural, masculine terms tend towards -us and -i. So Con- (together) vivo (life, living) -um (singular) means a single cluster or group; the same with -a means a group of groups.
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