I try to be guided by what is most likely to enhance people's enjoyment in playing Chihuahua.
Hence I'm not so much concerned with issues of logic or consistency as with
perceptions of logic and consistency. This is difficult of course, because of the diversity of players, ranging from someone who's just stumbled on the site and started playing for the first time to a veteran of the Pants Wars who has all the permitted plurals noted down on index cards.
However, it's not only new players who can be caught off guard by plurals. If I might allow a personal note to intrude into the discussion, a common word I missed in yesterday's Standard puzzle was
rapids. I, of all people, should be aware this word is acceptable, since I added it to the list in 2010, after wrestling with the issues it raises in
this post:
My first reaction to this suggestion was that it should clearly be accepted, as rapid is an adjective, and not the singular of rapids.
However, on looking into it, I find that most dictionaries have a listing for rapid as a singular noun, meaning a stretch of a river with fast-moving water, while noting that it is "usually" used in the plural. The singular usage does seem to be quite rare. One example quoted in the OED is from a 1900 letter by Bernard Shaw: "We steered the Society safely through a rapid in which it might have been wrecked." At the same time, the form rapids is sometimes treated as a singular word, though this is also fairly rare: "As with most things, there is more than one way to shoot a rapids." (Death on the Barrens, 2010, by George James Grinnell.)
I'm still inclined to think rapids should be allowed, since the singular rapid is little-used, and the word rapid is overwhelmingly used as an adjective.
This is far from an isolated example. I am continually missing out on words that look like plurals. Am I the only one who has this problem? If not, are forumites really sure that they want to add still more such words, to trip us up more frequently in the future?
I won't rule on
nuts, or
axes, right now, but the approach I have taken in the past is outlined in
this post from 2009 (responding to the suggestion of
taps, in the sense of a bugle call):
Words like this have a long history in Chihuahua, Tom. At one time I was swayed by reasoning similar to yours, and willing to accept any word ending in S which had a usage where there was no corresponding singular word, even where there were other usages as a conventional plural. At this time I agreed to accept hives (the disease) and divers (several). However, subsequent discussion about words for items of apparel caused me to change my mind. (As a result, hives and divers were not added to the list.) A search on "plurals" should lead you to several threads discussing these issues. Incidentally, threads is another one of those words, as an informal term for clothes. When someone says, "Nice threads!" you don't reply, "Thanks. Which thread do you like best?"
The approach I've been following for some time is to look at each case individually, and try to weigh up the relative familiarity of different meanings of a word. I conclude that most people seeing hives would think of structures housing bees, and most people seeing divers would think of those who engage in various aquatic pursuits. Pants is probably a borderline case, but as T says, I eventually gave in to relentless pressure.
I did actually give taps as an example, in this post, of words that I felt should not be accepted. A look in the dictionary reveals that tap has a surprising number of meanings, all of which can have an S appended to make a plural or verb inflection. I'm sure most people seeing the word taps would think of taps on the shoulder, dripping taps, phone taps, etc. Especially people outside the US, since it seems the military usage is specific to that country, but even in America, I think the military sense is strongly outweighed by other senses. (The Corpus of Contemporary American English has over 1600 occurrences of taps. I scanned the first 100, and there seemed to be only 2 instances of the military meaning.)
I can see that allowing pants and not taps will seem inconsistent to some players, but I fear that more people would perceive inconsistency if I allowed words like taps. Players who don't know of the military signal, or just don't think of it, will be wondering why taps is permitted while, say, pats is not.