Re: USAGE: THEORY/USAGE: irregular English plurals (was: RE:

John Cowan
> And Rosta scripsit:
>
> > Fair point. I don't remember ever checking to make sure. I guess I
> > went by the absence of bemused looks in the class, though after
> > all the essays I've marked in recent weeks I feel I set too much
> > store by the absence of bemused looks.
>
> I did a little googling for "oxes", and found the following things:
>
> - a band called the Oxes (not too surprising)
> - the deformed idiom "gore ADJ oxes" (reflecting "whose ox is gored")
> - "as clumsy (etc.) as oxes"
> - a learned article explaining all three of these by the bogus
>   semantic-stretch theory (we don't hear why there is no band
>   called the Foots or the Gooses)
Like 'wombat' and 'adder' (to take two random exx), 'ox' is a word
that many more people know than use.

Interestingly, my googling turns up _oxes_ as the plural of _ox_,
'person whose horoscope sign is the ox'.

--And.

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