addenda/s ...alumni

[Damien Hall]

It's a good question as to why they aren't 'alumnus associations'.  But this
posting reminded me of a poster I saw at the London School of Economics once,
asking for people who might want to form an association of the Brown University
alumni at LSE to contact the person who had put it up.  The question at the top
of it was 'Are you a Brown alumni?'.  This was 1996/7 and I haven't seen it
since.  It strikes me now that there are at least two possible reasons for the
confusion:

1) The one that Benjamin Barrett suggested, where the plural is used in a place
where there would usually be a singular ('alumni association');
2) The fact that the word is often abbreviated (and thereby anglicised) into
'alum(s)', so the writer of this poster, wanting to use the full form but
possibly having limited access to it and greater familiarity with the short
form, expanded that form wrongly.

Damien Hall
University of Pennsylvania