Word: singularability
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...William Wordsworth and the Age of English Romanticism" is one of those singular exhibitions that take you into the heart of a cultural moment, explore it in close detail and yet leave you eager for more. On view at the New York Public Library until Dec. 31, it has been jointly organized by Rutgers University and the Wordsworth Trust in England...
...several books earlier: a movement away from the narrow, intense psychological portraits of her early fiction (A Summer Bird-Cage, The Garrick Year) toward panoramas of realistic characters placed in a recognizable society. Drabble's progress was retrograde, running against the modern notion that fiction should be deep and singular rather than broad and general. Her models -- Dickens, George Eliot, Trollope, Arnold Bennett (whose biography she wrote in the 1970s) -- were either considered unfashionable or inimitable...
...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...
...matters of grammar, everyone can now do their own thing -- or so RHD-II argues in a note that endorses using their with a singular antecedent like everyone, something that was "nonstandard" in RHD-I. Hopefully seems a hopeless cause, a butterfly of an adverb that has turned into the caterpillar it-is-to-be-hoped, which RHD-II proclaims "fully standard." And because many people wrongly consider the past tense of sneak to be snuck (instead of sneaked), the word has been promoted from "chiefly dialect" in RHD-I to full respectability here...
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...