Saturday, January 3, 2009

Change in Process

Fiorella is endlessly fascinated with the English language.

Remember how you learned in school about words that stay singular in form even when they are plural in meaning? Words like deer and fish? Well, Fiorella's ever-attentive ear has been catching a lot of people talking about seeing "thirteen deers beside the road today" or catching "three fishes in the Pedernales."

On the other hand, Fio's noticed that several words are losing the the final -s in the plural. Just today she heard a woman refer to "two pair of pants." And Husband regularly talks about "two aspirin" or "three Advil."

A related phenomenon is that many people refer to that popular cutting tool as "a scissor," when it is, in fact, plural: "scissors." That situation, I think, results from not understanding that each of the cutting edges is a "scissor" in itself, that together they are "scissors." (The word scissor is probably related to the word scythe.)

Anyway, that's Fiorella's linguistic exploration for the day. She's not going to rail against any of it because language change is natural and unstoppable. Otherwise we'd all still be speaking Ye Olde English.


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