Word: plurality
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...dome while the Pope is walking in the garden below. Said John: "Why shouldn't they look? I'm not doing anything scandalous." He pronounced himself embarrassed at being addressed as "Holiness" or "Holy Father.'' and admitted that he could not get used to thinking of himself in the plural. "Don't interrupt me?I mean us!" he once joked. He even granted a papal audience to a traveling circus, and fondly patted a lion cub named Dolly. "You must behave here," ordered John. "We are used only to the calm lion of St. Mark...
Popes, like kings, have traditionally spoken of themselves in the first person plural-an arrogation that to many Protestants seems a sign of the issues that divide Catholicism from the rest of Christianity: the primacy of Rome, the doctrine of papal infallibility. When the non-Catholic Christian observers to the Second Vatican Council gathered in the Sistine Chapel for an audience with Pope John XXIII, they heard a rare and significant departure from form: the Pontiff pointedly referred to himself in the first person singular, and spoke with moving humility (see box). For the observers-some of them second-stringers...
...when Manhattan's Hotel Plaza sent him 1½ English muffins for breakfast, he called the head of room service and the manager and even threatened to call Owner Conrad Hilton, claiming that the menu said "muffins" and a measly 1½ did not live up to the plural...
Shin referring to the new Russian ambassador to the U.S., Anatoly Dobrynin, as a "Soviet-style New Frontiersman" [Jan. 5], you should have used the singular not the plural in the Russian translation. Instead of Liudi novykh granits, it should have been chelovek novykh granits. Liudi means men; chelovek: a man. You need a Russian language expert...
...Lentissimo, please. The plural of tempo, a musical term denoting the rate of speed at which a piece or passage moves, is tempi...