To sum up this discussion about plurals, I get the feeling that the weight of opinion is against any drastic changes. That would seem to include major changes of policy - such as allowing all plurals - and any mass admission of new words by the hundred under an interpretation of established policy.
(I still think there's merit in the suggestion I made of barring closely related words, without specifically excluding any plurals. I may, at some stage, set up a prototype to see how that works in practice.)
A number of people said we should continue to look at each case on its merits, but that doesn't actually eliminate the need for some criteria to apply in making those assessments.
The most contentious cases seem to be where two words are written the same way, such as
pants, that you wear, versus
pants, meaning what a dog does. I can't accept that in every such case, the word should be excluded. It would lead to some ridiculous results where one word is much more obscure than the other. I've given some examples in a previous post. Here's another one:
anus could mean something inside your pants, but it also could mean edible tubers from a twining herb,
Tropaeolum tuberosum, of the nasturtium family, found in the Andes. I don't think this plural meaning justifies dropping the word from our list.
But perhaps we have been drifting towards an excessively lax approach. Let's remember what this is all about - trying to please the player of the puzzle. On the surface, it might seem that excluding too many words is just as bad as allowing too many words - either way, someone will get annoyed. But, in practice, admitting more words doesn't actually make it easier for players to reach a given target level, because the targets get higher as more words are allowed.
If you're one word short of a rosette, and you think of
pants and try it, unsuccessfully, you may think, "If only
pants were allowed, I'd have a rosette now." Wrong! If
pants were allowed, you would have been two words short of a rosette, and after playing
pants, you'd still have one more word to find. On the other hand, if a player avoided trying
pants because they thought of it as a plural, and then the next day they saw that it
was allowed, and was the one word they needed for the rosette, they would have a genuine complaint - if
pants had not been allowed, they
would have got the rosette.
So, I think there are rational reasons for being reluctant to admit new words where the arguments seem borderline, especially where the proposed word would be classed as common.
I don't think any of the above reasoning need cause us to want to remove any of the "plural" words we have recently added. However, it does suggest to me a rethink of some of the words that have been accepted in forum discussions, but haven't yet actually gone into the list. They are:
What do we all think now about these? I'm still pretty sure that
mons should be allowed, because the plural words spelled like that are very obscure - even more rarely-used than the anatomical meaning. But I'm not so sure about the other three.
