Persons Who Need Persons

[A. Vine]

Peter McGraw wrote:
>
> On Thu, 22 Jul 1999 11:52:19 -0700 "A. Maberry"
> <maberry at U.WASHINGTON.EDU> wrote:
>
> > > On Thu, 22 Jul 1999, Peter McGraw wrote:
> > >
> > > > Anyway, said "authority" (who shall remain anonymous because I've
> > > > forgotten who it was) argued that it was "incorrect" to use
> > "people" as > > a plural for "person" because the former could not be
> > derived from the > > latter by adding a suffix.
> > >
> >
> > Hmmm. I've never heard that line of "reasoning" before, but maybe I
> > don't get out enough. According to the "authority" the plural of
> > "goose" would be ... ?

Wedgies.

>
> I don't know.  He probably just contented himself with gnashing his
> teeth whenever he came to that one.

Fangs.

(ooh, she's in a mood.  Been dealing with p.a.'s who are over-precriptivist.
Here's a question:

When writing English words borrowed from other languages that are written using
the Latin alphabet plus diacritics, do you write the accent?  For example, if
you write the word "café" do you write the acute accent mark?  This includes
handwriting as well as typing.  Other words used to "illustrate" this p.a.'s
point were "façade" and "résumé".

I and other self-confident non-apologetic-for-our-culture-vs-European-Americans
maintained that Americans in general do not write accents, don't learn how to
write the accents, don't learn to spell the words with accents, and in some
cases think writing the accents is a bit pretentious.

What do y'all think? )