Page 110 - Perfect English Grammar: The Indispensable Guide to Excellent Writing and Speaking

■ ■ ■
potatoes tomato tomatoes torpedo torpedoes veto vetoes

8.6.3 WORDS WITH NO SINGULAR OR NO PLURAL

Plurale tantum is a Latin phrase that refers to words that mainly exist only in the

plural. They don’t have a normal singular form, although people sometimes

mistakenly think they do.

■ ■ ■ ■ ■ eyeglasses pants pliers trousers scissors (The use of a scissor is a
hypercorrection and not a good choice, although a pair of scissors is

fine.) Some nouns do not have a plural form—singulare tantum—or else the

plural looks and sounds exactly like the singular form and is obvious only
through context. Often these are mass nouns, the collective name we use for

more than one of the same kind of thing, as with animals.

■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ barracks deer fish gallows info, information means offspring salmon

■ ■ ■ series sheep species sturgeon Foreign learners of English in particular
need to be careful not to use infos or informations, which may be permitted

in their first language.
In highly specialized uses, some of these words can take a normal plural

form. Fish, for example, can be fishes if you are discussing more than one
species of fish.

■ The laboratory is researching how different fishes acclimate to
warmer oceans.

This word is extra problematic because there are idiomatic expressions
where the word is pluralized as fishes: sleeping with the fishes, a phrase from

Mafia movies that means to throw an enemy into a body of water (perhaps after
giving them concrete boots), and the miracle of the loaves and fishes in the

Bible, in which Jesus feeds many people by turning a little food into a lot.

8.6.4 WORDS THAT LOOK PLURAL BUT AREN’T