Baldie/baldies

[Morbius]

One of the words I missed in yesterday's 10 letter puzzle was baldies.  I didn't play it because I'd already played baldie which was accepted.  Surely if baldie is accepted, baldies cannot be accepted because of the plurals rule.  It didn't cost me a rosette, but it's still rather annoying.

[blackrockrose]

I guess it means that 'baldy' and plural 'baldies' are both common, whilst 'baldie' is rare, as an alternative spelling of 'baldy'.

[Morbius]

Yes that's true, but it shouldn't alter the plurals rule.

[TRex]

Poor Alan cannot win on issues like this.

[Ozzyjack]

I can only find 2 instances where Alan has addressed Baldies

Well, if we accept beal, it won't be the first "obsolete except dialect" word we've admitted. But I am curious about all you people who keep trying it. Is this word part of your vocabulary, or is it just something you've picked up from crosswords or other puzzles?

I'm not persuaded about bandie.

As for baldie, I'd be interested to know why the Scots named a fishing boat after Garibaldi. Anyhow, despite this intriguing aspect, I think I'd have trouble persuading myself to allow baldie if it weren't for the fact that a few dictionaries list it as an alternative spelling of baldy, being a disparaging term for a bald person.

But if we allow baldie, should we then drop support for the plural baldies? As previous discussions on plurals revealed, there are strong feelings about these matters, but I think baldies should be retained in our list, on the basis that baldy is the far more common singular form.

Chihuahua currently accepts 127 words that can be formed by adding S to the end of another acceptable word. This list excludes words ending in SS, like assess.

In only 16 of these cases are both "singular" and "plural" words classed as common:

blues, briefs, clothes, craps, goods, maths, mores, outskirts, pants, passes, shingles, shorts, theirs, theses, tongs, yours

In most cases, the shorter word is rare and the one with the S at the end is common:

always, asses, baldies, basses, billies, caddies, candies, champers, chaos, conches, cosies, couches, cripes, crises, crosses, crudites, curries, doldrums, empresses, environs, fantasies, fesses, finis, fogies, galoshes, genus, glutes, grannies, heroes, honkies, hooves, huskies, hustings, jeans, knickers, knives, kudos, lefties, lenses, loaves, masses, matins, matrices, measles, menses, methinks, midwives, mommies, monies, musses, nannies, nappies, nixes, obsequies, overseas, pampas, panties, patties, penis, pinnies, pliers, plies, prognoses, relies, sasses, sheaves, sideburns, sideways, species, spies, sties, tapas, tatters, teddies, testes, tries, upstairs, vespers, wharves, wolves

It might be a case of following the old adage "Let sleeping dogs lie"

[mkenuk]

Would it cause too many problems to have a rule along the lines of:
'If a word classed as common which ends in consonant+y has an inflected form ending in '-ies', then that inflected form should also be allowed as common, regardless of whether there is alternative form of the word ending in '-ie'.?

A precedent, which I have mentioned before are the three words panty, pantie and panties, all of which are allowed in Chi. I can't remember which of them are common, however.

[Alan W]

I'm not sure that would clear up all the uncertainty, MK. In this case, Morbius had played baldie successfully, but he didn't necessarily know that baldy is an allowable word - he couldn't test it out as that puzzle had no y. More broadly, if we implemented your suggested rule we couldn't assume that every player would know about that rule.

A lot of such issues would disappear if we excluded all plurals ending in s. In other words, no baldies, but also no babies, not to mention no boxes, no potatoes and no indices. Maybe it would have been better if I had started with that policy, but to change to it now would drop out thousands of currently accepted words. In any case I think those types of plurals present an entertaining part of the challenge.

For quite some time I've been refraining from making any changes relating to "plurals" issues, feeling that I'm likely to do more harm than good. As the passage from 2007 quoted by Ozzyjack shows, I was already apprehensive 13 years ago, when I added baldie and left baldies as an accepted word. If only I'd let sleeping dogs lie then!