"loafs" (npl.)

[Mark Mandel]

loafs (npl)
My wife told me this evening of a phone conversation with someone at a
medical supply company who used the plural form "loafs" in referring  to
packages of gauze pads, each package about 10" long and 4x4" on the ends: a
pretty fair "loaf" in shape and consistency.

I wondered if the regularized plural was semantically conditioned, rather as
the past tense of "fly" is "flew" for the usual sense but "flied" in
baseball. Googling for "loafs" would bring in instances of the verb, so I
looked for "{loafs/loaves} of", both as a direct search and excluding
"bread" from the context:*

Raw Google hits
"loafs of" 117,000         "loaves of" ~753,000.
"loafs of" -bread:1,840    "loaves of" -bread: 73,800


rgh              "loafs of"    "loaves of"   ratio
(no modifier)    117,000          753,000     6
 -bread            1,840           73,800    40
     ratio            64               10

But if we look for "... of bread":
"loafs of bread": 991,000    "loaves of bread": 5,230,000

rgh           "loafs of"    "loaves of"  ratio
... bread     991,000       5,230,000    5
(no modifier) 117,000         753,000    6
    ratio           8               7


*The exclusion isn't very reliable; /"loaves of" -bread/ still gets hits
like
 - Loaves of Love: Learn the art of baking and shaping Challah with a twist
of social action
 - Loaves of Flavor
but also "loaves of" soap, fog, clay, bar-b-qued bologna, cheese, and of
course meat (buffalo meat vs. liver vs. vegetables, ScienceDirect,
http://tinyurl.com/3xb8pel).

All right, Google, how do you get 7- or 8-fold as many hits for the longer
string than you get for the substring? I'm too tired to try following this
through. Any ideas? I still don't know, but my first hypothesis seems less
likely now that I see how common "loafs" is overall. I'm gonna loaf off to
bed now.

m a m

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