Elvises -> Elvi(i)

[Mark Peters]

My favorite examples are "doofi" and "Jesi"--a bunch of doofuses and Jesuses. I believe "Jesi" is one of Stephen Colbert's many neologisms; I used it recently in my dictionary-blog:
  http://wordlust.blogspot.com/2007/08/jesuscest.html

  Mark

"Douglas G. Wilson" <douglas at NB.NET> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Douglas G. Wilson"
Subject: Re: Elvises -> Elvi(i)
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>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).

Cf. "stewardi" for "stewardesses". Sometimes it's just a joke, but ....

>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.

Plural of "virus": "viri" or "virii"? Of course it is neither,
facilitating measurement for this one word, maybe. "Virii" seems to
be the more popular based on quick naive Google.

In theory "octopi" vs. "octopii" is similar but I guess "octopi" has
been used so much that it's become sort of 'correct'.

I don't know exactly why "-ii" often occurs instead of "-i". Is the
_typical_ person wrongly doubling the "i" really the person who has
such things as "genii" in his everyday vocabulary?

Another common event: double pluralization, e.g., "diverticulum" >
plural "diverticula", taken as 1st declension singular, > plural
"diverticulae".

Another: wrong singularization, e.g., "mitochondria" >
"mitochondrium", "nares" > "nare".

-- Doug Wilson


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