I've been wondering why otherwise seemingly intelligent and capable people continue with affectations like 'virii'. Maybe they think the double 'i' makes them sound smarter? This has always confused and annoyed me. The real plural for virus is of course viruses. It has a dreaded 'ses', not two i's. When are people going to give up the chance to sound like bigshots? Every time another email worm comes around, you see self-proclamined experts talking about "virii this" and "virii that"... If I was King of All U.S. of A, I'd ban TechTV first thing.
And where the hell did that extra 'i' come from anyway? You can use the plurals cacti and octopi (although cactuses and octopuses are preferred), but what would you think if someone said "Yes, there appear to be quite a few octopii in that tank." or "Please watch your step as there are many cactii about..."? Did Webster have a sale on i's at some point? Is today brought to you by the letters i and i?
While I'm ranting, let me just say that the only thing worse than seeing 'virii' in print is hearing someone say "veye-rye". Damn that's annoying... you might as well pretend to have an English accent while you say it. I'd even prefer "veer-eye" over the long first i. Those waterheads sound like Fry's clerks hawking overpriced Norton products to Joe Simpleton the Hewlett-Packard PC owner. Strangle strangle strangle.
Oh yeah, one more thing to rave on about while I'm on the subject: trojan != worm != virus. Those are three distinct things! They have different infection vectors, life cycles, etc. The virii get royally pissed when you confuse them with trojii and worii.
I ought to make a virus/worm/trojan that infects windows machines. I'll call it 'callthemViruses!goDdammIt.A'. It'll add/change a line in the c:\msdos.sys file to "BootDelay=999999" and then it'll drop in a new logo.sys file to an image which simply has the definition of the word 'virus' on it. Have people get a nice, long look at that while they wait a million seconds to boot up.
Well, enough of my pet peeve du jour. I'm home sick with a real biological virus. Instead of try to work I'm going to do some more word puzzles. I've got a book of rebii around someplace...
what is the plural of asshole? that's the only thing I could think of while reading that stupid rant.
Posted by G.G. McGovern at February 16, 2003 1:22 PMEnglish has a very simple pluralization scheme; we just tack "es" or "s" onto the end of a noun depending on which is easier to pronounce. (e.g. "bus" becomes "buses", "asshole" becomes "assholes", etc.)
The "i" comes from latin, where the pluralization scheme has a different form depending on what the last sound in a noun is. So, the singular "stella" becomes "stellae", "Romanus" becomes "Romani", and so forth. I don't know if "cactus" is derived from Latin, but if it is then it's just fine to say, "hey! go jump in that patch of cacti."
Two comments:
Asshole? At least I have the nuts to say something and use my real name while doing it. If you want to bag on somebody, it won't mean much until you grow a pair and let them know who it is that is saying it. Hiding behind anonymity is completely lame. The only word I could think of while reading your stupid post was "pussy".
I know that the i comes from latin. But not all nouns get the us->i rule applied to them. For example, status and hiatus only change in sound (a long final vowel). Genus changes to genera and corpus to corpora (third declension). Cactus becomes cacti, not catcii. Latin has a word 'viri', but it's plural of 'vir', which is a second declension noun. The word 'virus' is a fourth declension noun, it gets the 'us' ending and so becomes 'viruses'.
Posted by wee at February 17, 2003 10:55 AM