Re: (OT) Is Usenet dying?

Gongoozler <trevor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
On Tue, 29 Jul 2008 18:26:12 +0300, Phil Carmody
<thefatphil_demunged@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Gongoozler <trevor@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Phil Carmody wrote:

Gongoozler writes:

With the multitude of other forums (fora?)

Yup, fora for the plural. Podia, stadia, media, bacteria,
corpora, labia, pudenda, atria, inter alia, et cetera.

Nope, Fowler gives pl. as Forums (with a long dissertation as to why)
and Collins Dictionary gives: p. -rums OR -ra.

Fowler is wrong in so many (long) ways that I stopped
paying attention to his assertions about "modern" English
some time between the wars.

In which case you are obviously too old to know that a completely new
edition edited by R.W Burchfield was issued in 1996 and reissued in
2004.

What do you get when you poilish a turd?

The dictionaries available to me: OED, Collins and Penguin all give
the plural of "forum" as EITHER "forums" OR "fora".

So, like me, they disagree with Fowler.

In a time when knowledge of Latin rules is fading fast there is a
general movement towards the use of *English* plurals.

You mean "use of English plurals formed from English singulars".
We already had "fora" as the English plural for "forum" before
"forums" came along.

Personally I
much prefer "forums" to the pedantic "fora" (which is what noJ said,
but in more colloquial terms).

I like simplification on the whole. I'm one of the few
mostly-pro-Noah Brits I know, but I think that several
schemata should be common and well-known enough that
replacement of them all by "just add an 's'" would cause
more damage than it would fix.

Interestingly, my spell-checker accepted "forums" but rejected "fora"
- but then it always wants me to spell "tyres" as "tires" :)

Well, if it's a spell-checker, I'm surprise it doesn't want
you to spell it "eye of newt".

Phil
--
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all.
-- Microsoft voice recognition live demonstration
.

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