hypercorrect pluralization of attributives

[Charles Doyle]

I'm teaching Milton this semester, and it's awfully hard not to get quippy and punful about Satan's "eaves dropping" on our first parents.  "Eave dropping" works even better!

--Charlie
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---- Original message ----
>Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2009 09:29:05 -0700
>From: Arnold Zwicky <zwicky at STANFORD.EDU>
>Subject: Re: hypercorrect pluralization of attributives

>meanwhile, Joel Berson has pointed out to me that the OED has an entry for "eave", back-formed from "eaves", with citations from 1789.  the -s of "eaves" was not originally a mark of the plural, but in modern english the word is standardly plural in its syntax, and that led to the creation of a singular "eave".  though many sources (like CGEL) treat "eaves" as invariably plural, back-formed "eave" turns out to be pretty frequent these days; a google search on {"to the eave"} turned up plenty of examples -- many of them with "eave" as the first element in a N-N compound (like "eave strut"), but many of them not.
>
>arnold

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