Re: OT--Re: Help me find 5 mistakes and than solution to thoes mistakes!

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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



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