Author Topic: Plurals (again!)  (Read 2854 times)

Morbius

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Plurals (again!)
« on: March 20, 2012, 10:40:29 AM »
I must say, I'm a little confused by the application of the rules for irregular plurals.  In yesterday's Challenge puzzle I unsuccessfully played the word 'cabbies' (thus ruining my 100% hit rate!)  Although 'cabbie' is one accepted spelling of the word, so is 'cabby', so shouldn't 'cabbies' count as an acceptable plural of 'cabby'?

TRex

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Re: Plurals (again!)
« Reply #1 on: March 20, 2012, 11:30:18 AM »
(Sigh) -- I also tried cabbies thinking it the plural of cabby. I didn't even think of cabbie. But when I compared words with my better half, she had cabbie and insisted that she has never seen it spelt cabby!

whateverman

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Re: Plurals (again!)
« Reply #2 on: March 22, 2012, 03:30:31 PM »
Todays (22-03-12) standard had 'guts' not only acceptable, but common! :-R

How does that work?

cb

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Re: Plurals (again!)
« Reply #3 on: March 22, 2012, 11:00:08 PM »
Polite request:  please don't post spoilers to current games - save it for the next day, or post in a separate thread and mark it with a "Spoiler" warning in the heading.

I always read the new comments on the forum when I sign in for the day, often before I've done more than a quick glance at the puzzle.

Cheers!
cb

Alan W

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Re: Plurals (again!)
« Reply #4 on: March 23, 2012, 01:06:21 PM »
There are a couple of issues here.

Cabbies

The first thing you need to know, Morbius, is that the original removal of plural words from the list was done by an automatic process - a program deleted every word that was the same as another word with S appended to it. This produced a number of obvious errors - news is not the plural of new, needless is not the plural of needles, etc. So I tried to find such cases and restore the words, but some were inevitably overlooked. The correction of such anomalies relies on people raising issues, such as this one, and me considering the word and deciding how to handle it. This has been going on throughout the life of Chihuahua. Cabbies is a case that has never been raised before as far as I can recall.

Words like this are particularly troublesome because of the two singular forms, cabby and cabbie. The approach I take with such words is to allow the plural if it seems that the -y version is used a lot more often than the -ie version, for the singular. For example, I allowed caddies (after some hesitation), because it seemed that caddy was favoured over caddie by about 50 to 1. On the other hand, there are situations, like pixie, yuppie and cookie, where the variant ending in Y is very rarely used, so it would surely be confusing to players if the plurals were allowed.

In this case, it appears that cabbie is used more often. The Corpus of Contemporary American English has 144 examples of cabby, but 341 of cabbie. The British National Corpus also has cabbie dominant, by 50 to 31. I think if I were to allow cabbies, it would create more discontent than it would remove. A player who had successfully played cabbie would very likely assume there was no point in trying cabbies, and I think the disappointment of someone who misses a common word, because they assumed it would be disallowed, would outweight the disappointment of someone who lowers their hit rate because they assume a word will be allowed.

Guts

This word was initially excluded, but was added in 2008. I felt sure I had posted some discussion of the word, but I can't find it. It was among a number of words ending in S that I was admitting, after a lot of discussion on the forum about the issue of plurals.

My thinking is that in the most frequent uses of the word guts, it is not as the plural of gut. Usually guts is either an informal term for the stomach, or a colloquialism for courage. In the latter case, it's certainly not the plural of gut. But in talking about the stomach, gut and guts tend to be used with the same meaning. A "pain in the gut" is the same as a "pain in the guts". We don't use the latter expression when the pain is more widespread. We don't say, "My pain in the guts is going away; it's just in one gut now."

Of course, gut can also be used in a more formal way for the intestine, and here guts could be used as its plural. A scientist who has been busy dissecting frogs may have a row of guts laid out on the laboratory bench. But this is a much more specialised usage.

So, I feel the acceptance of guts was justified, but I'm not sure about its common classification. Of course it is a common word, but sometimes when it is not so obvious why a word is acceptable, I have leaned towards making it rare. The other word that was allowed, as a common word, at the same time guts was admitted, was goods. This is probably less contentious, because good is normally not a noun at all, but an adjective. Even so, I'm sure there are players who miss out on playing goods because it looks like a plural.

...It's all too hard, really.
Alan Walker
Creator of Lexigame websites

Morbius

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Re: Plurals (again!)
« Reply #5 on: March 23, 2012, 10:00:39 PM »
Thanks for the explanation, Alan.  I understand the rationale for disallowing cabbies on the basis that cabby is the less frequently used form of the word and that allowing it would probably cause more frustration than not allowing it.  The difficulty for players, of course, is knowing when this rule applies.  Like TRex, I've always spelt it as cabby and thought that was the predominant form.  However, it's all part of the fun!