Word: plurality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...churches in Africa and Asia had differing views on women but united to confront the West on other issues. The most striking example was a decision to end long-standing church teaching against the baptism of polygamists. The Africans said the traditional stand cruelly forced converts to abandon their plural wives. Now converts in polygamous societies will be allowed to keep their wives if they forswear further marriages...
...with the modifier hopefully. If you do, forget it; the battle is lost. On the other hand, if you still insist that infer and imply mean two different things, hang tough, despite accusations of being a word prig; this is one the word prigs could win. As for the plural-singular identity crises suffered by words like data and media, stand by; they could go either...
Data and media were plurals pure and simple in RHD-I; the new edition advises that data can be either singular or plural, and media as a singular has become common in, of all places, the media. Another favorite media word, kudos, has undergone an even more perplexing transformation. Originally a singular meaning praise or glory, it has been misconstrued so often as a plural that, by a process lexicographers call back-formation, it has spawned a synthetic singular. Sure enough, here it is with its own entry in RHD-II: kudo. What next? Will a single instance of pathos...
...used, walked with the same gait, held his hand in his jacket pocket with the thumb sticking out, just as J.F.K. did. He has a penchant for some of the high destinarian rhetoric that Kennedy used, the appeal to a visionary new generation. Hart kept using the first person plural in his press releases. His campaign sounded a note of the bogusly grand. Hart is Kennedy typed on the eighth carbon...
...Charles Kurzman's article of April 28th on "Rejuvenating Radcliffe" fails to recognize the important role that Radcliffe College plays for many women and men on campus, as well as its alumnae (note the plural feminine). First and foremost, I think that Mr. Kurzman misses the symbolic importance of maintaining Radcliffe the College. Demoting its status to a "Resource Center" would be to turn our backs on the history of women. True, the purpose of establishing Radcliffe was to provide women with a Harvard education, but along the way women discovered that that wasn't all they wanted or needed...