addenda/s ...alumni

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:51 PM -0400 8/22/04, Damien Hall wrote:
>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.
>
I vote for 3), simple reanalysis:  the majority of English speakers,
including those who have graduated from college, are under the
impression that "alumni" is a singular, and has effectively (if, to
some of us, regrettably) regrettably.  I certainly hear "X is an
alumni of" as a singular all the time on sports talk radio, in
contexts excluding any compound source ("alumni association").
Perhaps expansion of "alum" is involved, but I tend to think it's
more like the way "criteria" has become a singular, when neither (1)
nor (2) are motivations.

larry