Setting Things Straight
Sep 09, 2004 in General
I wrote this in a comments reply. Some things that you thought were right, but are in fact wrong.
Fruit vs fruits/Fish vs fishes/Bread vs breads–If you didn't know already, you're not supposed to add the plural marker -s or -es just for the sake of identifying the noun as a plural one. The plural marker is implemented to distinguish variety. The singular form is also used as the usual plural form for all these words. Did you not know this already?
Anyway I learnt this on the job. Took me months of un-learning to do. On the other hand, I do make up my own grammatical rules here and there. The language is a living one, Damn it. You can't kill it by keeping it static. Leave it to the bloggers to cook up new terms, invent new hybrids. Besides, the word 'blog' didn't exist 10 years ago.