Word: plurality
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...capitalist system last week faced a new menace. It was the shmoo (plural: shmoon, or colloquially, shmoos...
...Christian sense there could not conceivably be more . . . Peter Damiani, the medieval divine, commenting on the words uttered by the serpent in Eden ('Ye shall be as gods'), remarked that the Devil was the first grammarian when he taught men to give a plural to the word 'God.' It should have neither a plural nor the indefinite article. It is a proper name...
Petelka's vocabulary starts with personal pronouns: I is 1; you, 2; he, 3; she, 4. Adding X to the word-number makes a plural (man is 330, men is 330X). There are no articles, conjugations of verbs or declensions of nouns (except for the possessive case). Parts of speech are indicated by zeroes (democracy, the noun, is 8730; democratize, the verb, 87300; democratic, the adjective, 873000; democratically, the adverb, 8730000). Says Petelka...
...days after he received an LL.D. from New York's Columbia University, former Secretary of State James F. Byrnes told Aiken County, S.C. high-school graduates that the phrase "you-all" was good English-if it is used as Southerners use it, in the plural. Said Byrnes: "There is nothing which irritates me quite so much as to attend the theater in New York and hear an actor . . . impersonate a Southerner and, in addressing an individual...
...well-regulated mind of Herbert Morrison, Labor's Leader of the House of Commons, there are few tendernesses for old abuses. Thus, Labor's bill to reapportion seats in Parliament called, as well, for an end to a time-honored anachronism: plural voting. With a battle cry of "One man, one vote," Laborites denounced in particular the custom of having the financial "City" of London and the graduates of British universities elect their own M.P.s*. Last week, Morrison admitted that he could never think of the ancient City of London "without having in my veins some degree...