Re: CHAT: Macintoshen

John Cowan wrote:
>Steg Belsky scripsit:
>
> > >     P.S.: Anyone heard of this practice of rendering the plural of
> > > Macintosh as Macintoshen?  Who dreamt this up?
> >
> > Sounds to me like an analogy based on _hamentash_ ~ _hamentashen_.
>
>I think Macintoshen < VAXen < oxen.  There is a hackish tendency to
>extend irregularities: we also have boxen as the plural of box in the
>sense of "generic Unix/Linux/BSD computer".  On a wider front we
>have terms like winnitude and lossitude, which exploit the English
>ability to add Romance affixes to Germanic roots, but extending it
>to an affix which normally can't do that (unlike re- and -er, e.g.).
Speaking of extending irregularities, I (who's most certainly not a hacker)
have caught myself pluralizing "kid" as "kidren" - obviously on the model
"child" - "children". Anyone else doing this?

                                                     Andreas

_________________________________________________________________
Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com