Parenthese

Arnold Zwicky zwicky at STANFORD.EDU
Sat Jun 25 23:14:00 UTC 2011


On Jun 25, 2011, at 3:36 PM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>
> Here is a video where the final -s is taken off "parentheses" to form
> the singular form "parenthese."
>
> There are about four instances starting at 3:30 on the video.
>
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D1pzVPSSUrRA&feature=3Drelated

we went over back-formed singulars from "parentheses", "indices", "matrices" etc. back in 2008.  here's a brief mention on my blog:

http://arnoldzwicky.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/an-old-joke/

this has been on my list for assembling into a posting for years.  but then the list has many hundreds of items on it, sigh.

arnold

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



More information about the Ads-l mailing list