919: Misused Plurals Jun 15, 2017

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The post yesterday was concerned with the different sorts of plurals that people use in English, but there are still a number of plurals that people don't use (at least not often). There are plenty of originally Italian terms ending in '-i' that have made their way into English, such as 'spaghetti', 'graffiti', 'paparazzi', and 'cannoli' which people almost always use as singulars. It doesn't help that some of those may be thought of as a collective in the same way that people talk about hair in the singular, though certainly 'cannoli' does not belong to that group. Other words that are more common as plurals like 'lice' are sometimes also confused as singulars (instead of in this case 'louse'), so it isn't only with loan-words either. You could say that ordering one cannoli is a faux pas, but be careful, as doing that a second time would result in plural 'faux pas' being pronounced the same, and not that you made two /fō ˈpäz/.

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