On Wednesday, Aug 18th 2004 at 10:04 -0700, quoth Taylor, ForrestX: =>On Tue, 2004-08-17 at 13:52, Andrew Dietz wrote: =>> Ok, here's my biggest pet peeve: =>> =>> The plural of CACTUS is CACTUSES, not CACTI, and the plural of =>> VIRUS is VIRUSES, not VIRII. => =>My pet peeve is the improper spelling of Latin plurals ;o) => =>The Latin plural of VIRUS would be VIRI if it had one, certainly not =>VIRII. Virus never had a plural in Latin because it a mass noun, not a =>count noun. => =>cacti is an acceptable form of plural for cactus (in Latin and English). Wrong! The plural of virus is viruses. The word virus can be used as either a mass noun as in "He has a rhyno-virus." which would imply that he has a large number of individual virus particles infesting his body. The alternate is that it is used to refer to individual virus particles at the 20-30nm scale. Since the word is not derived from Latin, there is no possibility of the word ending in the second declension nominative plural "i" suffix to denote plural. The English plural ends in "es" for that reason. And a pet peeve of mine is misuse of Latin in general, e.g., the biggest of which are confusing i.e. and e.g., and mispronouncing etc (i.e., et cetera) as ex cetera. -- Time flies like the wind. Fruit flies like a banana. Stranger things have .0. happened but none stranger than this. Does your driver's license say Organ ..0 Donor?Black holes are where God divided by zero. Listen to me! We are all- 000 individuals! What if this weren't a hypothetical question? steveo at syslang.net
