Cotoneaster

Following my post accumulating all my gardening words, a Wordlady reader has written to inquire about COTONEASTER, a quite popular shrub. She became acquainted with the written word before hearing it spoken (a problem shared with the people in this post), and so thought it was pronounced "Cotton Easter". I must admit I shared that misapprehension with her for a long time. (Be honest, now, how did you hear the title of this blog post in your head when you saw it?)  

In fact it is "kuh tony ASS ter".

Its name comes from modern botanical Latin cotonea (quince) + the suffix  -aster, essentially the Latin equivalent of  "-ish". So a cotoneaster is a plant that is "quince-ish", kinda like a quince:




The flower called an "aster" tout court gets its name from another word, the Latin and Greek word for "star", aster. As you can see in this photo, it is an appropriate name. 



Fortunately, botanists have resisted the urge to name an aster-ish flower an "asteraster".

The story of how we got to "quince" is also quite fascinating. The Romans had originally called the fruit a mālum Cydōnium, from mālum (apple) + Cydōnea (the name of the town in Crete now known as Khania). This became classical Latin cotoneum.
 
As we have seen before (peach), Latin words got squished into something shorter by the French, who usually dropped the ending and the middle consonant. So cotoneum became coin in Old French (a different coin than the one meaning "corner"). In modern French this is spelled coing, just so we English don't have a monopoly on ridiculous silent letters in spelling. 

Like many French food words, coin (also spelled quoyne or quyne) was borrowed into Middle English. So why don't we call the fruit  a "quin"? Very early on, the plural "coins/quynes" (also spelled "quince") was taken to be the singular. Naturally, we then had to create a new plural, to wit "quinces".

For another surprising word history involving quinces (and cats), click here:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2013/06/cat-word-of-month-marmalade.html

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Status quo

Well, I'm not done with plurals of Latin words yet, but I promise I'll talk about a different usage issue next week. 

Back in my dictionary-writing days, one of our eager correspondents inquired why no plural form is given for the word "status" in The Canadian Oxford Dictionary. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, he went on, gives the plural as "statuses" which, he said, "sounds ridiculous and would make it the only Latin derivative with an "es" ending. As far as I am concerned I consider the plural to be "stati" and I would like to know why this is not in the dictionary."

The word "status" is not given a plural because it is a regular noun (forming the plural in -s or -es if ending in a sibilant). This is something that English native speakers can intuitively do.

"Status" has been in the English language since the late 17th century. It has been consistently printed in roman rather than italic type, indicating that it is fully naturalized, since the mid-19th century. Fully naturalized words in English usually form their plurals according to English rules rather than according to the rules of the language from which they were borrowed (otherwise we would talk about the "stamina" of a flower rather than its stamens). The OED entry for the word, which would have been edited in about 1910-15, gave the plural "(rare) status", pronounced "stay tee us", since the plural in Latin is, surprisingly, status (with a long u) rather than the regular masculine plural in -i. I am not sure on what the OED editors based this pronouncement because there is in fact no  evidence of the word being used in the plural in the original OED text. The revision to the Supplement to the OED, edited between 1972 and 1986, states "now usu. statuses" for the plural. I think they could have said "now always statuses". Nowhere in the whole text of the OED or the huge databases of quotations that we consulted for the dictionary was there any evidence for the plural "stati" (which, as we have seen, was not the Latin plural anyway) being used in the English language. It must be said also that "status" is simply not used much in the plural.

Despite my correspondent's categorical assertion, there are a number of other Latin borrowings in English ending in -us that form their plural with -es. For example:

sinus

chorus

apparatus

solar plexus

rebus

abacus

bonus

arbutus

lotus

impetus

fetus

hiatus

census

consensus

virus

campus

crocus

circus

hibiscus

discus

exodus

genius

callus

isthmus

ignoramus

anus

and all the dinosaurs

When you get right down to it, even "bus" and "plus" are Latin words ending in -us, and yet no one says "Three bi drove past" (or writes to dictionary editors complaining that we should)!

There are many more such words where English speakers can choose between -es and -i but where -es is more common, such as thesaurus, focus, etc. (If you feel you "ought" to say "thesauri", get over it.)

English is English; Latin is Latin. Surprisingly, they are not the same language!

One pizza, two...?

There's been quite a lot of response to my recent post about the plural of "antenna", some of it of the "shock, horror" variety. The prestige of Latin and Greek plurals has a strong hold on our psyches. Quick, now, what's the plural of "psyche" in ancient Greek? Can you imagine how complicated life would be if we had to know the plural in the original language of every word in English. WAY too complicated, especially when there's that handy English regular -(e)s ending just begging to be used. So we don't phone up the pizza place and order "two large pizze" or stop in our local coffee shop to ask for "two cappuccini". Other languages apply their own pluralization rules when they borrow foreign words, too; the plural of the French word "cameraman" is "cameramans".
Someone asked about "index". Was I in favour of "indexes" rather than "indices"? Well, yes, I am. Not that my being "in favour" of one thing or another has any importance; it's general usage that decides these things.
Here's the Canadian Oxford Dictionary:

index

→ noun  ( pl. indexes or esp. in technical use indices   'IndIsi:z )


If you consult the OED, you will discover that "indexes" (or even, gasp, in the 1500s,"index's") has been around for centuries, and the OED too gives "indexes" as the first plural of the word, stating quite baldly that it is the usual plural for the alphabetical listing.  Now, usage has it that we prefer "indices" for the "sign or indication of something" sense, and when you think of it, that sense hardly exists in the singular anymore. Mathematical and scientific usage favours "indices", but that is just part of the phenomenon of Latin and Greek plurals being more resilient in those fields than in general usage.  I wonder how many mathematicians and scientists nowadays have ever studied Greek or Latin; I doubt that this trend will continue.
In the face of the overwhelming weight of regular English plurals, trying to maintain a foreign plural in English is an uphill battle with few if any benefits.
For more on the history of the word "index", see this post.

Of etymology and entomology

At last, a post which really is about both etymology and entomology!
I recently saw an article in the Toronto Star stating that 8% of Canadians receive their TV signal by "antennae". Now, the Star is not one for pretentious Latin plurals (or any Latin plurals for that matter) so it rather surprised me that they hadn't used "antennas", which, as the Canadian Oxford Dictionary entry shows, is the standard plural for the broadcasting sense of "antenna", whereas "antennae" is used for insects, lobsters, etc.:

antenna

→ noun 
1. ( pl. antennas ) a metal rod, wire, or other structure by which signals are transmitted or received as part of a radio or television transmitting or receiving system.
2. ( pl. antennae) (Zool.) one of a pair of mobile appendages on the heads of insects, crustaceans, etc., sensitive to touch and taste; a feeler.
3. (antennae) the faculty of instinctively detecting and interpreting subtle signs (the dulling effect of the suburbs on a person's hipness antennae).
- DERIVATIVES antennal adjective  (in sense 2).
- ORIGIN Latin, = sail yard

What is a sail yard, you are no doubt wondering, and what can it possibly have to do with an insect's feelers? It's not the same word as the one you use for your garden. A yard is a horizontal (or diagonal) bar attached to the mast of a sailing ship, from which the sail is suspended.

You can see from the picture above the resemblance of  the bit of the yard jutting out beyond the end of the sail to the feelers on the head of an insect.  A fifteenth-century translator into Latin of a work about insects decided to use the word antennae instead of the word cornuae (horns). This caught on amongst the entomology set, and since it was snobbier to use Latin words for scientific subjects than  boring English words like "horn" or "feeler" which had served perfectly well until then, finally took over as the standard word in English. In 1894 Marconi, experimenting with radio transmission, patented an elevated antenna, and the word took on a new life. 

Flus, gnus, emus, and tutus

Flu season is upon us. The word flu is typically a mass noun, meaning it isn't often used in the plural. But, like all mass nouns, it can be, because there are many different kinds of flu. This raises the question: how do you spell the plural of flu?

If you found the word flus by itself written on a piece of paper, it would look very odd: "What the heck's a FLUSS??" you might wonder. Thus, you might be tempted to do something else with the plural, such as adding an e before the s. However, this would give you flues, which is the plural of a different word designating part of a chimney. Or you might think about sticking in an apostrophe, "flu's", but this is not recommended.

Bear in mind that words are almost never devoid of context that [fancy lexicographer word alert] disambiguates them. You probably did stumble over the title of this post, because of the lack of semantic context to help you. But if you are talking about flu in the plural, it is likely to be in a phrase like "colds and flus" or "there are a lot of different flus going around this year", so your readers shouldn't stumble, or at least not for long. There aren't many words in English ending in -u, but those that do exist (e.g. gnu, emu, tutu) all form their plural by simply adding an s. By the way, if you want to see some really funky tutus, visit this post.

You can, of course, also avoid the problem by sticking to using flu as a mass noun: "Colds and flu are taking a toll this year."

The word flu was a 19th-century shortening of “influenza”, which the English had borrowed from Italian in 1743. Influenza, like the English word “influence”, comes from the Latin influere (to flow in).In the Middle Ages, astrologers believed that an ethereal fluid flowing from the stars or heavens affected people's characters and events generally, so influenza in Italian and “influence” in English referred to the impact of the stars on human life. Since this kind of influence was thought also to cause illness, Italians used influenza to mean a “visitation” of an epidemic disease, an influenza of chicken pox, catarrh, and so on. When a particularly nasty flu outbreak hit Italy in 1743, people just used the word la influenza by itself. As flu does, it spread, and the English adopted the Italian name.

As for the part of a chimney, the flue, its origin is unknown.