Elvises -> Elvi(i)

[James Harbeck]

I don't think I'd been aware of this one until I heard a cousin use
it jokingly today, but it seems a popular plural of Elvis (as in
Elvis impersonators or "tribute artists") is Elvi, and I see that it
is also frequently rendered with two i's, Elvii (Googling {Elvis
"Elvi"} gets 91,300 hits, but some of those might be typographical
truncations; {Elvis Evlii} gets 9,850).

Of course, this is silly, since it's not "Elvus", but the -ii version
also taps into something that I'm seeing rather often that kind of
bothers me: using -ii rather than -i as the plural of -us. I suspect
that it comes from seeing plurals such as "genii" and noting the
double i and assuming that it's the proper plural for -us rather than
realizing it's because it's from -ius.

So this is a kind of double-barreled one here: the evidently
tongue-in-cheek rendering of "Elvises" as "Elvi", which has been
going on for I'm not sure how long (anyone?), and the mistaken use of
-ii rather than -i as the plural of -us, which I have the impression
of seeing with growing frequency of late, but of course I have no
data to confirm that impression, and it would be bloody difficult to
measure this one suitably.

James Harbeck.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org