Shingles (the roof kind and the illness)

Photo by Austin Walker on Unsplash

A friend of mine came down with the painful ailment known as shingles last week. All her friends commiserated on Facebook and wished her a speedy recovery.

I, meanwhile, heartless as usual, was thinking:

1. What does that have to do with the shingles on my roof?
2. Is "shingles" singular or plural?
   

Actually I did wish her well too! Shingles is a horrible affliction.

First question: What does that have to do with the shingles on my roof?

Well.... nothing.

These are two entirely different words.

The roofing shingles, like so many architecture words, apparently came into English from French after the Norman Conquest, though no such word now survives in French. It is thought that it came from Latin scindula, a later form of scandula ‘a split piece of wood’.

There are a couple of idioms associated with this word:

hang out one's shingle
(apparently only North American, though I did not know this before)

• Begin to practise a profession.

  ‘a license to hang out their shingle as a financial adviser’

And the ever inventive Australians have come up with

a shingle short
Australian informal

(of a person) stupid or slightly mad.

The malady "shingles", on the other hand, which also came into English in the Middle English period, comes from Latin cingulus (a girdle or belt), because the red rash caused by it looks like a belt around the torso. This description can be better detected in the modern German name for the disease, Gürtelrose. The medical name for the condition also includes this idea of a girdle: ‘herpes zoster’ comes ultimately from Greek zōstēr ‘girdle, belt’, and herpēs, literally ‘creeping’, from herpein ‘to creep’.

2nd question: Is "shingles" singular or plural?

As you can see, the "s" at the end of "shingles" is not etymologically an indicator of a plural; it's just the "s" in the Latin cingulus. So technically "shingles" is a singular noun, and treated as such.

shingles is a painful, blistering skin rash that affects more than 1 million Americans every year

It can be plural when the emphasis is on the resulting blisters rather than the illness itself (The shingles were extremely painful), although I don't think it's possible to create a singular "shingle". But most of the people on my friend's Facebook post referred to the disease in the plural, no doubt influenced, as we English speakers are so much, by that final s.

One good result of this: it reminded me I was due for the booster on my shingles vaccine, so I hustled off to the drugstore to have that taken care of.  I wish it hadn't taken her coming down with it to give me that nudge.

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