Re: Singlular of "mouses" Was: Re: Negative ordinality

Peter Bleackley wrote:
> Staving Jorg Rhiemeier:
>
>> I have heard the plural "meeces" for the latter at least once.
>> But don't ask me why.
>
>
> There was a cat-and-mouse cartoon (I don't remember what it was called),
> where the cat's phrase was "I hate meeces to pieces!"
>
>> And the plural of "box" (computer hardware) is "boxen".
>
> By analogy with "oxen". Particularly applies to VAX machines, or VAXen.
Also "unixen", meaning multiple varieties of UNIX. From the Jargon
File's entry on overgeneralization in geekspeak
<http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/overgeneralization.html>:

| On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything ending in ‘x’ may
| form plurals in ‘-xen’ (see VAXen and boxen in the main text). Even
| words ending in phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated this way;
| e.g., ‘soxen’ for a bunch of socks. Other funny plurals are the
| Hebrew-style ‘frobbotzim’ for the plural of ‘frobbozz’ (see frobnitz)
| and ‘Unices’ and ‘Twenices’ (rather than ‘Unixes’ and ‘Twenexes’; see
| Unix, TWENEX in main text). But note that ‘Twenexen’ was never used,
| and ‘Unixen’ was seldom sighted in the wild until the year 2000,
| thirty years after it might logically have come into use; it has been
| suggested that this is because ‘-ix’ and ‘-ex’ are Latin singular
| endings that attract a Latinate plural. Among Perl hackers it is
| reported that ‘comma’ and ‘semicolon’ pluralize as ‘commata’ and
| ‘semicola’ respectively. Finally, it has been suggested to general
| approval that the plural of ‘mongoose’ ought to be ‘polygoose’.

Replies