Word: pluralization
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...have been busy for a long time trying to sort out the past worth keeping from the past worth getting rid of. It's a job that connects us with most of the world's people today-the vital business of achieving a particular identity in a plural world...
...Swift do not ask that the Classics be rewritten, might not Hamlet some day be forced to say "What a piece of work is people!") They predictably bridle at "he" or "his" used as pronouns when the sex of the antecedent is unspecified (everyone will get his comeuppance). The plural pronouns "they" and "their," they suggest, could become singular, unisex pronouns. Purists will howl, but the usage (everyone will get their comeuppance) is already lamentably widespread...
Many of the poems are written in the first person, singular or plural. Yet instead of becoming familiar with this voice--whose pattern of speech changes from poem to poem--the reader becomes aware of the themes that "I" or "we" favors: themes like the sea, a woman's sexuality, a sort of science-fictionalized view of the world, the family history and tawdry yet mysterious American middle- or working-class culture. These themes hold small clumps of otherwise disparate poems together while Sagan is trying out styles of writing. They provide, at least, a way of fitting her work...
...hunted them down. Now, he says, streams as small as one meter across yield platypuses. "Even in dams and ponds with no streams feeding into them you find platypus in them," he says. (He avoids the difficult choice between platypuses and platypi by simply saying platypus for the plural.) But Temple-Smith says he does not know how much more work he will do on platypuses; "the field work is not easy to do." In almost all of the cases of people trying to keep the creature in captivity, the platypuses have died. Just why platypuses dig burrows...
...Virginia, seconded by John Adams and adopted on July 2, 1776) that provided the occasion for the Declaration of Independence declared "That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States." Even until the Civil War the nation was commonly described in the plural, as "these United States...