Comments on: Multiple Plurals, Multiple Meanings

By: Amy

Amy — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 01:58:21 +0000

I don’t know if this is correct or not, but I prefer to use “antennae” for the plural of insect appendages, and “antennas” for the plural of wireless communication devices.

By: Maeve

Maeve — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 04:29:24 +0000

Pence is the plural of penny. Pennies is also the plural of penny.

By: --Deb

--Deb — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 03:37:31 +0000

Fabulous list. I never realized that “pence” was the plural of “pennies.” Learn something new every day (grin).

By: Maeve

Maeve — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:55:23 +0000

I guess I wasn’t sufficiently clear about “staffs.” I was thinking of “staff” in the sense of a team of workers and “staffs” as a group plural. The individual members of a staff I would call “staff members.”

By: Brad K.

Brad K. — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 19:15:36 +0000

I also encounter index and indices in a near-mathematical context – in database structures.

You mention staffs as workers – what about staffers? I think of ’staff’ as ‘the group of support people enabling the the technical or professional central figures of an office’, office being used in either the suite of rooms sense or the sense of the duties one assumes.

Then I would use ’staffs’ in “combine the staffs of the offices of transportation and education” to be plural support groups. Staffers would refer to the workers without regard to the office they support. “Some staffers would be transferred to the office of parks and recreation.” Well, that last one came off a bit lame, but still.