Showing posts with label plurals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label plurals. Show all posts

loose end

Apr 26, 2020
Thomas West was responsible for last week's post topic, and here he is again, having tweeted: Reading that, I first thought "I think that's a mark of my Britification—the singular is probably what I'd say now." I then wasted some time searching things I'd written (on Twitter, on this blog, on my hard drive) that used the expression, and found none. What else are lockdown Sunday mornings for?

But then I thought more and thought "But do at a loose end and at loose ends always mean the same to me?"

Loose ends, of course, need to be metaphorically tied. Both Englishes talk about, say, a project having loose ends, which need to be tied off or tied together to give us something finished—that won't unravel. Here I'm just interested in the at expression, which has more particular uses, and in which the metaphor gets a little more buried. No one says I'm at loose ends, so I'm going to tie them or I'm at a loose end, so I'm going to tie it/myself up. Maybe when you're at a loose end, you can get the image of hanging idly, or when you're at loose ends you have a sense that you have "ends" that you don't know what to do with.


The Collins Dictionary website can be useful for looking into such things as it has a whole bunch of dictionaries together: the Collins COBUILD (meant for English learners, BrE-based but more apt to cover American variants), Collins English Dictionary (which is BrE-based), and Webster's New World Dictionary (WNW; AmE-based).  COBUILD presents at a loose end as a feeling of boredom, and simply states that at loose ends is the American equivalent. (Collins English Dictionary defines it as "without purpose or occupation".)


Where Collins has one definition for the singular (and by extension, the plural) phrase, WNW gives three senses for the plural phrase:

 

Now, all of those senses are very similar, and so this looks like a difference in lexicographical style—whether you lump similar uses together or split them into definitions that describe more specific situations where the phrase is used. The Collins "without purpose or occupation" could be mapped onto senses 2 ('without anything definite to do') and 3 ('unemployed') in WNW. It's the 'unsettled, disorganized' bit that feels a bit different from COBUILD's 'bored'.  What's unclear from that definition is whether it's people or situations that are unsettled and disorganized—that is, "I am at loose ends" versus "We left the project at loose ends".

So, I had a little look in the GloWBE corpus, to see if I could find differences in how the singular phrase is used in BrE (42 unique usable examples) versus the plural phrase in AmE (20). There are few enough of these that I can look at all the examples. (The four "AmE" examples for the singular phrase were actually from British sources, so I won't consider them.)

All of the examples in both countries are talking about people, rather than situations. Some seem to be in the 'disorganized, confused' sense—and I had to wonder in some of these cases if the writer was thinking of the phrase at [someone's] wit's end. These 'confused" examples were there in small numbers in both countries, so it is looking like the expressions really are equivalent in AmE and BrE, it's just a matter of different dictionaries splitting the senses more or less.

  • BrE source: any advice will help as im at a loose end surely there is something i can do to sort this out??? 
  • AmE source: As a former (public school) teacher I was at loose ends how to educate my daughter  (in context, this meant: didn't know which choice to make) Otherwise, most of the examples in both places signify 'having nothing particular to do' or 'idle'.
Merriam-Webster, another US dictionary, gives only one definition, which seems to combine all three of WNW's senses, and makes it clearer that this expression is used of people, rather than of their situations: 
US
not knowing what to do : not having anything in particular to do 

But I found two things in the data interesting:
    1.  As someone with both phrases in my repertoire, I felt like I'd have to use the plural with a plural subject. That is, I [singular] may be at a loose end, but my friends [plural] would be at loose ends, because they each have their own loose end. The data had five British plural at loose ends and 3 of those had plural subjects, but the BrE singular at a loose end was also used with  plural subjects.  This might be like collective noun agreement, in that the BrE speaker might be considering the semantic number more than the grammatical number: we are at loose ends if we're separately loose, but we are at a loose end, if we're reacting to a singular situation. That said, I don't think the data really show this in most cases. In the first example below, we get a BrE plural verb with a grammatically singular (BrE) football club name, but their loose end is singular.  (Note that the collective plural in BrE isn't as semantically driven as some people—even me in the linked-to blog post—claim. I discuss that in chapter 6 of The Prodigal Tongue.)
      • BrE singular end, plural subject: 
        • AC Mill Hill were at a loose end  and started to play the hopeful long balls.
      • BrE plural ends, plural  subject:
        • tens of thousands of men with military training are put at loose ends each year
       
    2.  AmE has a few examples of at loose ends with [one]self, which seems to have a particular sense of feeling 'lost' and 'purposeless'. BrE doesn't seem to have at a loose end with:
      • AmE: Years ago I had a client who always seemed to be at loose ends with himself.

    None of this has addressed Thomas's question "why?"  "What's the difference?" questions are answerable. "Why do they differ" questions are often not, both because the evidence is not available and because change in idioms is rarely a simple straight line. Things that change don't simply change once, they change thousands of times in small and diverse ways before they arrive somewhere else.

    The thing to keep in mind here is that things had loose ends centuries before people did. People were talking about loose ends in other kinds of contexts, so if the expression as applied to people started in the singular (and it probably did), then it would be unsurprising if the plural (about things) noun phrase (loose ends) affected the singular (about people) prepositional phrase (at a loose end). When I searched for the at phrases in Google Books, there were lots of loose ends in the early 1800s, but the OED only notices the 'idle person' meaning from the 1850s onward. So, I put an am in front of the at in my searches (in order to make sure that the loose ends belonged to people) and got this (there are no British hits for am at loose ends). That seems to confirm that the plural expression came later, with the singular having some presence in AmE, then falling out in the first half of the 20th century:



    But the other thing to note about origins is that the phrase was not originally at a loose end in BrE either. The at took a long time to settle down. Early examples in the OED have after a loose end and on a loose end, and the OED also notes another expression from more than 100 years earlier than at a loose end: at the loose hand.

    • 1742   R. North & M. North Life F. North 77   He was weary of being at the loose hand as to company.
    So perhaps the metaphor was originally one of idle hands rather than fraying rope? Is that why we don't talk about tying up our loose ends, because the expression didn't evolve from a nautical rope metaphor?  At any rate, as idioms evolve, they often influence each other and that could have happened here.

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    pigs in blankets

    Feb 23, 2020
    This keeps coming up on Twitter and in the comments at other posts, so let's talk about (BrE) pigs in blankets/(more common in AmE) pigs in a blanket (singular for both: pig in a blanket).

    Recipe at BBC Good Food
    British pigs in blankets are small sausages wrapped in bacon (and cooked!). They are delicious. They're traditionally served alongside turkey as part of Christmas dinner. (For me, they almost make up for the fact that Brussels sprouts are also a traditional part of Christmas dinner in England.) The usual sausage involved is a chipolata, which we could call a BrE word because it's hardly heard in the US (16 UK hits on the Corpus of Global Web-Based English, but zero US ones). But then again, it's not that there's another word for it in AmE, so better to call it a UK-and-not-US thing, rather than a BrE word. Basically, all the non-imported sausages (and even some of the imported ones) are different in the UK and US.

    These are (increasingly, I think) found in US cooking, but I haven't heard them called pigs in blankets in the US. My brother, with no prodding from happy me, has started serving them as pre-dinner snack at Christmas time, and we call them sausages wrapped in bacon. Now that he does that, pretty much the only thing I like better about UK Christmas than US Christmas is the fact that I don't have to travel for my pigs in blankets. (Sorry, mince pie fans.)


    Recipe at food.com
    In AmE, pigs in a blanket are usually small sausages wrapped in dough (and cooked!). They are delicious. When I was a kid, this usually involved (AmE) cocktail franks* (also cocktail wieners, little smokies, and general-English cocktail sausages) wrapped in the kind of Pillsbury dough that comes in a tube. I think that when I was a kid, this usually involved the dinner-roll dough, but nowadays I see most of the recipes online (including Pillsbury's) involve their crescent-roll dough. (Even though I should know better now, I'm still dangerous around a basket of freshly baked Pillsbury crescent rolls. There's no point in calling them croissants, though. A crescent roll is like a croissant that's been photocopied 100 times and then had hydrogenated palm oil added.)
    * Note that on the Oscar Mayer package, the sausages are now wrapped in bacon. Trendy.

    Recipe at BBC Good Food
    The use of crescent-roll pastry, rather than a bread dough, takes American pigs in blankets a step closer to the British sausage roll, which is a sausage (often just the sausage meat) encased in puff pastry. But to my senses, US pigs in blankets and UK sausage rolls are very different things, due to the differences in sausage spicing, sausage/pastry ratios and coverage, shape, etc.). The ones in the photo here are 'mini sausage rolls', but a non-mini sausage roll contains as much sausage as a typical hot-dog-style sausage.





    Recipe at Splendid Table
    The final type of pig in a blanket is an American breakfast food: American-style breakfast links wrapped in an American-style pancake. They are delicious. This is the least common meaning for the expression, but one you used to be able to find on an IHOP menu. The key thing to know about these is that American breakfast sausages are nothing like any breakfast sausage in the UK. They have a lot of sage, are much slimmer than most UK sausages and sometimes casing-less, and are really well complemented by maple syrup. If you order sausage in a US breakfast diner, you may well be asked links or patties? If you've ever seen a Sausage McMuffin, you've seen a sausage (AmE) patty. You get those by slicing them like salami (but thicker!) from a big ol' package of sausage meat.

    (This paragraph added in response to comments) The plural pigs in blankets is more common in BrE, while AmE tends toward pigs in a blanket. In the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the ratio is about 1:4. That said, I think the plural blankets is found more in print—the COCA examples include a lot of spoken ones and fictional dialogue. Looking at Google Books ngrams, pigs in a blanket seems to be a rather recent plural.)

    Now comes THE BIG TWIST IN THE TALE. The term pig in a blanket is originally AmE, but it  had nothing to do with sausages at the beginning. The OED has its first recorded use of the term showing up in 1882 and referring to oysters wrapped in bacon. This dish shows up slightly earlier in UK cook(ery) books with the name it still has: angels on horseback. The first record of a sausage-related meaning is from 1926, and refers to a sausage in a roll, rather than one baked into dough, and that meaning continues on in the 1940s. (I've found additional examples as well as the OED's up to 1948.)  Apparently, the first known use of it in the "rolled in dough" meaning occurred in 1957 in Betty Crocker's Cooking for Kids. Essentially, it looks like the current AmE meaning coincides with the wide availability of packaged refrigerator doughs.

    As for the BrE meaning, it's not hard to imagine the AmE term coming over to the UK and being re-interpreted. It would not have been needed for oysters-in-bacon, since BrE already had an equally weird term for that. Sausages, usually made of pork in the UK, make a lot more sense as a 'pig' than an oyster does.


    Other sausage-related posts for your information, edification, or appetization: (Is that a word? It is now.)
    on hot dogs
    on red hots
    on baked goods (pigs in blankets briefly mentioned)
    on breakfast
    on bangers
    on pudding (including black pudding)

     PS: Nancy Friedman has shared this glorious picture of the 1957 Betty Crocker's Cook Book for Boys and Girls (Betty Crocker = an American institution), showing (a) that the use of mini sausages was a later thing, and (b) the traditional plural form. I love the hat-tipping wiener and frank—and the explanation of the difference.
    .


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    alumni

    Aug 2, 2016
    Last month Linguist Laura wrote a blog post congratulating the students who were graduating from her program(me). She discusses graduate, then moves on to alumni, excerpted below. I've highlighting the bit that was news to me.


    When the graduands morph into graduates, they also become alumni, another Latin word. It's plural, in that form, and pedants will have know[n] that the singular is alumnus or alumna, depending on whether you're male or female. Again, this is a bit annoying for English speakers who don't really bother that much with gender other than pronouns, [...]

    Normal procedure when removing gender distinction is to go with the male for everyone: actors and actresses become actors, lady doctors become doctors, and so on. With alumni, we're taking to using the plural form for everyone. You're an alumni once you graduate. This ever so slightly grates on me but I am a good linguist and a descriptivist and do not go around correcting people. I don't know why we use the plural. We're familiar with this in words like cactus/cacti so we might have used alumnus as the singular; we just didn't. Perhaps it's because we use alumni in the plural way more often than the singular and, as it's not that common a word, that's the one that stuck.
    I am not sure who the we is here. Laura's department? English speakers? It seems to me it's British English speakers, as in my experience Americans haven't adopted the plural as a singular.

    First, Americans use the gendered singulars. I looked for an alumn* of in the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWBE) in order to get only singular instances:

    (I checked the one that says alumni* and it's by a graduate of The Open University [UK] who uses the word maths, so I have mentally flipped it into the GB column.)

    In AmE singular alumni amounts to about 9% of the total, but in BrE it's about 22% (and in Canadian English, it's 35%). Note the lack of alumna in BrE.

    When Americans want to avoid the gendered Latin terms, we often hack off the Latin suffix. I am an alum of the University of Massachusetts. I am friends with many of my fellow alums.

    The word looks odd and is hard to pronounce if you don't know that it's a clipped form. It is not a homophone with the astringent chemical alum. The chemical is A-lum, the graduate is a-LUM, following the stress pattern of the suffixed form. I've also seen it spel{led/t} alumn and I kind of like that better. (There are 6 instances of alumn in GloWBE, 5 American and one that is classifed as GB, but when you look it's from an organi{s/z}ation in New York. None of these is in the phrase an alumn of, so they aren't included the numbers below.)

    An alum of gets 10 hits in the US and 2 in GB (all legitimate; plus one Canadian hit, for those keeping track). If we add these to the numbers in the chart above, we get the following proportions:

    a ___ of AmE BrE
    gendered singular alumna/us 81% 75%
    plural-form singular
    alumni    		 8% 21%
    clipped singular
    alum    		 11% 4%
    total number 88 52


    Now, if you worked at a college/university in the US, I am quite sure that you would hear alum much more than you'd hear singular alumni. I had a quick look in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which showed twice as many an alum of as an alumni of (though the numbers were small--21 in total).

    So, a few points of unseemly defensiveness after all this:
    • Americans are able to and do use the Latin gendered suffixes. I mention this because there seems to be some belief that the British know Latin better than Americans do.  One of the interviewees in Jones's book on English expats in the US says she felt "she got to win a lot of arguments" because Americans assume “I [have] this great level of culture [and speak] and read fluent Latin” though of course she didn't. Similarly, I've had it said to me that Americans make barbarous "false" Latin words because we aren't close enough to the language. An British commentator on early American accents wrote that "Americans do not, however, speak or pronounce English according to our standard; [...] probably from a want of any intimate knowledge of Greek or Latin." I can't see much evidence for thinking the contemporary British folk have some access to Latin that contemporary Americans don't. Latin comes and goes in both American and British schools. Yes, the fancy public (i.e. private) schools of Britain do tend to offer Latin, but so did my run-of-the-mill American high school. Very few schools anywhere require it (or even offer it) any more--though apparently it's popular with American home-schoolers.
    • If you see Latin plurals masquerading as singulars, it's not a case of "American political correctness" coming over and "ruining" the language. The British are very capable of being sensitive to gender discrimination and changing the language themselves.  
    The other thing to notice is that Americans use these words more. In fact, Americans have a great head start on using them. This is not necessarily a bragging point. The reason Americans needed these words earlier is that American universities have long depended on their graduates' generosity.

    That was not an issue for British universities, which until recently were funded mainly through government grants. While I've lived in the UK, I've seen tuition fees go from 0 to over £9000 per year. And it was only once the government stopped directly funding university teaching that universities needed to step up relations with their graduates in the hope of getting donations and bequests. That's when my university got an Alumni Relations Office, something any American university would have had decades earlier.

    Americans, I would say, have a keener sense of alumnihood. They have stickers identifying their alma mater in the back windows of their cars. The phrase alma mater is about four times more common in AmE than BrE (in GloWBE). They go to homecoming. They follow their institution's sports teams for the rest of their lives. (The need to keep alumni involved is a big reason for American universities having so much sporty activity.) They might even know their college's/university's song. That's in general, of course. I can't say I do any of those things. But I know many more Americans than Britons who do. 
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    forest, wood and woods

    Sep 8, 2013
    I am supposed to be giving the 'How America Saved the English Language' talk in Ashford at the moment, but it had to be cancel(l)ed because the organi{s/z}er isn't well. I hope it will be rescheduled--but not on a day like today when the Brighton-Ashford train journey/trip would have involved replacement bus service (a hated phrase in BrE, if ever there was one).

    So, I dip into the inbox to find a suitable blogging task, and out comes this from Ben S:
    I was watching the clip episode for QI and in it Rob Brydon explains the phrase "missing the wood for the trees" REDACTED FANCIFUL ACCOUNT OF ORIGIN OF THIS PHRASE. [Lesson: check any facts that appear on QI. They may be Quite Interesting, but they're not always true. --ed.] But, as an American, I've always heard "missing the forest for the trees"
    Hey, speaking of QI, I was on the (orig. AmE) radio/(dated BrE) wireless this past week with Stephen Fry (the host of QI) on Fry's English Delight. By the time you read this, it may not be available for listening-again, but here's the link to the episode. The most very frustrating thing about this program(me) is that it is about spelling. My job is to talk about spelling reform in the early days of the USA. So, to introduce me, Fry announces 'That's Lynn, without an E.' Watch forty-something years of trying to get people to spell my name right go straight down the toilet. Thanks, Steven! (But much fun to be on the program(me).)

    Wait, what? You wanted me to talk about the phrase Ben asked about? Oh, all right then. Missing the wood for the trees is the main BrE version of this phrase and missing the forest for the trees is the main AmE version, as shown in this entry from Cambridge Dictionaries Online:
    Ben sent me a long message about this because Brydon's tale about the meaning of this phrase treated it as if the wood in it referred to (AmE) lumber/(more BrE) timber--which is also the usual way that an American would understand wood without an s on the end. But that's what was wrong with Brydon's story. The BrE wood here is woods in AmE (AmE kinda-sorta. There's more to say.)

    When talking about tree-filled land, BrE has woods as well as wood. Preschools here are filled with children singing If you go down in the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise. (Actually, most people these days sing If you go down to the woods today. Better Half has just declared the original lyric obscene.) But one hears a lot more of wood as part of place-names in BrE than AmE (e.g. Bromwich Wood). And one hears it in as a common noun to refer to foresty places. Here are some examples from the Corpus of Global Web-Based English (GloWBe), which strike me for their general morbidness (I've 'retouched' one of the lines to remove an irrelevant reference to a sexual act in a wood pile):


    Now, I had assumed that Americans use the word forest more than the British do, because I often hear this wood where I would have said forest. But that's not the case--checking a few corpora, the British seem to use forest just as much as Americans. (Since one of those searches was case-sensitive, I don't think it's a case of place-names throwing the numbers.) I had this impression because if I were to Americani{s/z}e some of the sentences above by replacing the BrE wood, I'd put in forest. But that's because of the a. If I were allowed to change the whole noun phrase to be natural to my AmE brain, I'd change a wood to the woods. Now, it may seem strange to have the the there, since that's a definite determiner,* and it implies that we know which woods we're talking about. But it's really not that strange to use the when talking about geographical place-types, since we talk about people liking to swim in the sea or go hiking in the mountains, even if we don't know (or if it doesn't matter) which ones they do it in. To be clear: one can say in the woods in BrE. But since one can also say in a wood in BrE, the British don't say in the woods as much as Americans do.

    Back to the 'for the trees' proverb: it is older than old, but in John Heywood's Proverbes (1546) it is given as ye cannot see the wood for trees. The forest version goes back at least into the 19th century in the US. I can only presume that it came to be preferred over the wood version because that version is confusing in AmE, where it would pretty much have to be woods. But, as Brydon, in his misunderstanding of the phrase on QI, demonstrated, it's not just ambiguous to Americans--since wood has more than one meaning in both countries. (If you'd like to see the discussion on QI, it seems to be on YouTube in several places. Probably illegally, so I'm not going to link to it, because those links eventually fail.  But should you want to search for it, it should be in (BrE) series 10, episode 3 'Journeys'.)


    * As long as I'm talking about definite determiners, I can mention that I'm the 'Ask a Linguist' linguist in the current issue of the lovely new-ish language magazine Babel. The topic there is the the (or lack of it) in the phrase in (the) hospital. I've covered that before here, but I cover it better in the magazine--which I really recommend for anyone who's interested in language. Subscription info is here.



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    making head(s) or tail(s)

    Jul 29, 2007
    Continuing on my backlog of old requests: a colleague who's involved in a Catalan-English dictionary project forwarded (back in March) part of a conversation arising from an unfamiliar translation in the project. The Catalan phrase in question was apparently (no) trobar ni caps ni peus, and the lexicographer was questioning the translation of it as (not) to make heads or tails (of something), because she, a BrE speaker, would have said (not) to make head or tail (of something). Indeed, the plural version is the AmE version, and the singular the BrE version. (This is backed up by John Algeo in British or American English. He found only the singular in BrE texts in his corpus, and only plural in AmE texts.)

    I suppose the reason I didn't write about that earlier is because there's not a lot more to say about it! It's unclear why the AmE version gained the plural markers. The phrase head or tail is defined by the OED as 'one thing or another', so etymologically speaking, the singular makes some sense. Growing up with the AmE version, I visuali{s/z}ed the things that one 'could not make heads or tails of' to be chaotic things--sort of like a Breughel painting as done by Jackson Pollock, where you wouldn't be able to find the heads or the tails of the beings in it. The BrE version lends it self to a visual that is imprecise, but not necessarily chaotic. But then, how one pictures such things must be a highly individual experience...
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    math(s)

    Mar 17, 2007
    Postscript  Since writing this post, I was a part of a Numberphile video, which gives a quicker reply to the math or maths question. So, you might want to watch that, then if you want more on the linguistics of it, continue to the post below the video.




    As promised in the comments of my last post, this post pulls together and expands upon discussions that have come up more than once in comments on other posts and e-mails to me. Back in July, Ahab wrote:

    I was castigated recently by a Brit for the nonsensical nature of saying math when the long form is mathematics, so any explanation you can provide on that front would certainly put my mind to rest.
    Castigation is common on the math/maths issue, and the castigation is usually British to American. So, I'm going to castigate a bit in the other direction, because there's absolutely no reason why maths should be considered to be more correct than math.

    The castigation usually goes: "Mathematics is plural, so maths needs its -s." It's a logic based on a false (AmE) premise/(BrE often) premiss. Just because there's an -s at the end of mathematics doesn't mean it's plural. The suffix -s is homonymous. Homonymy is when the same lexical forms (i.e. words or affixes) have unrelated meanings/functions. That is to say, it's when two words/affixes just happen to be pronounced/spelt the same. So, can is a homonym because either it can refer to a kind of container (can of Coke) or it can be a modal verb (I can go). Those two cans are completely unrelated. Similarly, there are several suffixes with different meanings/functions that all coincidentally have the form -s:

    suffixfunctionexample
    -spluralone cup > two cups
    -spresent tense, 3rd sg
    verb agreement    		I run > he runs
    -sadverbial markerunaware (Adj) > unawares (Adv)
    -snoun markerlinguistic (Adj) > linguistics (N)
    (I've left out the possessive suffix 's, because it has some complicated properties that aren't relevant here.)

    How do we know that these are really different affixes, and not just the same affix doing a range of jobs? Partly we know from history. The plural -s comes from an Old English case suffix (-es or -as). The verb one has derived from the suffix -eth (or -ath) in earlier Englishes. The adverbial one is related to the possessive 's. And our friend the nominali{s/z}ing (=noun-making) suffix generally affixes to roots from classical Greek. (See comments for further discussion.)

    These suffixes differ in their productivity -- that is, how regularly/predictably one finds them in contexts where they could, in principle, go. The first two are very productive--although there can be exceptions in which they are not used. That is, while -s is the most productive plural marker in English, it's not the only plural marker--we also have -(r)en in children and oxen and a zero (invisible) suffix on sheep and fish (one sheep, two sheep).

    The last two in the table are not very productive at all, and the last one is the -s we find in mathematics. Because we have a very productive and common plural -s and a not so productive/common nominali{s/z}ing -s, people often mistake the less productive suffix for the more common suffix. This has raised such a debate in the field of folkloristics that no fewer than three articles in Journal of American Folklore have addressed the final -s in folkloristics. [See References, below.] In one, Bruce Jackson calls folkloristics a noun with 'no existence as a noun in the singular', but he's corrected by Dan Ben-Amos, who says that folkloristics is instead a singular noun with no existence in the plural. (Note that there is no *folkloristicses.)

    How can we tell whether or not this -s is marking a plural in mathematics and folkloristics? We do so by seeing whether the words trigger plural behavio(u)r in other words in the sentence. A first test might be whether you can count mathematics (* means 'ungrammatical'):
    *one mathematic*two mathematics
    *a mathematicsome mathematics

    Mathematics doesn't work with numbers because it's not a countable noun, it's a mass noun. That is, it does not take plural marking because it is not the kind of thing one can or does count. Similar examples (without the confusing -s) on the end are cinnamon and boredom. Note that you don't talk of putting *cinnamons in your food (unless you're making the point that they are different types of cinnamon--which is a different matter), nor does one suffer *boredoms if the boredom happened at different times. Cinnamon and boredom are treated as masses with undistinguishable (or at least not-worth-distinguishing), and therefore uncountable, parts. If we want to make such words countable, we have to use another noun to do so: two teaspoons of cinnamon, three episodes of boredom. Similarly, you can have three theories of mathematics or three mathematics classes, but not *three mathematics.

    The third person, singular present tense -s verb suffix (the second -s in the table above) provides another test of singularity. If the subject of a verb is singular, then the verb needs the -s (or the equivalent in an irregular verb like is or has), but if the subject is plural, it can't have the -s. So:

    singular subjectplural subject
    The idea pleases me.The ideas please_ me.
    Mathematics pleases me. ??Mathematics please_ me.
    Now, some of you will say that Mathematics please me is what you'd say. This is the effect of the folk-belief that mathematics is plural; it has started to change how people use the word. We see the same kind of language-change due to misapprehension of the -s suffix in the short form maths. Math is the older form--the OED has examples back to 1847, but examples of maths only from 1911.

    Another interesting point here is that you don't see the same kinds of abbreviations for other nouns with the nominali{s/z}ing -s. For example,when BrE or AmE speakers abbreviate linguistics, they tend to say ling. I've never heard anyone talk about the Lings Department.

    Why is maths the exception here? It probably has something to do with the fact that it's a much more common word, especially since it refers to a school subject. Because it's more common, it's subject to more folk-reasoning about it and more spread of that folk-reasoning. It also requires more frequent abbreviation than less common (linguistics, folkloristics) and shorter (physics) similar words. So, someone along the line misunderstands it as plural, starts using the -s in the abbreviation, and perhaps making it agree with plural verbs, and it spreads. It carries on because the belief that -s on nouns is always a plural marker is a simpler belief to hold than that -s has different functions on different nouns.

    Better Half has just run in from listening to A Prairie Home Companion, where he says that Garrison Keillor just said you do the maths. (The AmE expression is usually you do the math.) We met Keillor (if it counts as a 'meeting' to have a book signed and make a little chit-chat about being an American abroad) in Brighton a couple of years ago, and in many ways you could say he's not a typical AmE speaker (even though he certainly trades on his down-home midwesternism), since he's lived abroad at various points in his life. But do let me know if you're a Minnesotan who believes this is one of Keillor's actual down-homeisms.

    Myself, I do tend to say maths in BrE company, but only because it's so painful not to. Can you imagine if I had to say all of the above every time I was unjustly castigated?

    References
    Ben-Amos, Dan. (1985) On the Final [s] in Folkloristics. The Journal of American Folklore, 98: 334-336

    Hansen, Wm. F. (1987) A Note on the Final [s] in Folkloristics. The Journal of American Folklore, 100: 305-307.

    Jackson, Bruce. (1985) Folkloristics. The Journal of American Folklore, 98: 95-101.
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    scale(s)

    Mar 16, 2007
    Was out with my friend the Blinder tonight, talking about my plan to re-establish a gym routine and improve my diet. (Let's see how long that lasts.) I need to make my plan as numbers-driven as possible, and need to involve Better Half in the process in order to discourage his practice of showing me how much he loves me by making me more food. (Today I was packed two lunches.) So, I said that we need a new scale, as the one we have now (which I've had since 1987--it's lived on three continents) measures in pounds, whereas BH understands weights better in stones. The Blinder said, "There's one for your blog," and I replied "I've already done it!" But guess what? I haven't! All this writing I do is just running together; I've written about scales in the lexical semantics textbook I'm writing. The exciting implication of all that is that I can basically cut-and-paste bits from that manuscript and call it an exciting preview of my forthcoming textbook. Recycling! It's good! The only problem here is that the bit that I'm cutting and pasting is part of a larger discussion of noun countability. You'll just have to buy the book to make sense of it all, won't you now? [I'll paste in links to the catalog(ue) entry when it's finally published. Here I am, four years later, adding that link.]

    Historically, the name for a weighing device is scales. It is plural because scales had two clear parts in which one thing was weighed against another. So, they looked like this:

    (a)
    Modern scales don’t involve balancing things in two plates (photo from here):

    (b)AmE has changed along with the scales, so that item (b) is usually called a bathroom scale, but scales is still used for the older kind. In BrE and AusE, however, it is still called scales, no matter whether it has two salient parts or not. When Anna Wierzbicka (Semantics: primes and universals) asked Australians why the word is plural, they answered that it was because there are lots of little numbers on the contraption. This seems to be a case of the word leading the thinking about an object. That is, because they say scales instead of scale, some people think about scales as being 'made up' of little numbers because they need to make sense of the fact that this singular object gets a plural name. Wierzbicka also notes that Australian English has shifted from speaking of a pair of scales, to a set of scales (for (b)). There, it looks like the name scales was broadened to cover (b) as well as (a), but when people started to think of numbers (of which there are many) rather than the plates on which measurable bits are put (which come in pairs in (a)-type scales) as the 'plural' part of scales, they shifted to thinking of scales as sets, rather than pairs.

    Hm, aren't you just dying to take a lexical semantics course now? Or at least in the market for a textbook? Hey, maybe I can get you a discount...
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    die and dice

    Sep 12, 2006
    While I read every newspaper that comes into my house from cover to cover (with the exception of the sport(s) section, which I hie to the recycling while wrinkling my nose), I'm not particularly careful about reading them when they are actually news. So I was just reading the 'Comment' section of the Guardian from 26 August 2006 when I came across this line by Johnjoe McFadden (Irish born, but raised in "the UK" according to his bio):
    In Luke Rhinehart's novel The Dice Man, the eponymous hero makes all his decisions by rolling a dice.
    I can hear any one of my schoolteachers responding to that sentence with "You mean a die. Dice is the plural of die."

    Not necessarily, dear teachers.

    Die is certainly the preferred singular in AmE, but in BrE one is likely to see dice as both the singular and the plural, even in edited texts like newspapers. A90Six comments on the forum at wordreference.com:
    Many people in the UK would not even be aware that die is the singular of dice. Some even believe that when die is written in games instructions it is a typo with a missing c....
    The only time die is really heard is in the expression, "The die is cast," meaning - something has been done or a decision has been made that will now have to run its course and fate will decide the outcome.
    Better Half disagrees, and says that in his English mind it should be a die and not a dice in the newspaper, but some of my linguistic colleagues have in the past chided me for using die. More evidence that BH spends too much time with Americans? What do you say?

    The history is a bit convoluted--but both forms have been used in the singular since the 14th century.
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    Abbr.

    AmE = American English
    BrE = British English
    OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)