By David Astle
Phil floats between tables, keeping his small talk brief. He bears water bottles and requisite tumblers, taking orders and receding into thin air, the many years of running cafes part of his demeanour. But last week he hovered. He lingered over my table, restless with a question.
"Cheese or Jesus?" he asked. A big dilemma to solve, given the early hour, not to mention the bliss of aged cheddar, the crisis of palate versus soul. Before I could formulate a reply, Phil added, "The lunch menu needs a refresh, including a platter, maybe some Tassie brie, a chunk of Tarwin blue."
Cheese or cheeses?Credit: Eddie Jim
I wondered when the messiah was due, but then Phil eased the tension: "So should the menu say a selection of cheese or cheeses? Google says either/or." As my latte cooled, I did my finest lexicographer impression: "It depends."
It depends on your spruiking philosophy really. Say you wish to accentuate the dairy cornucopia, then opt for cheeses. English allows you that, just as sugar or milk, oil or wine, occupy the uncountable larder, keeping intact for the most part, unless a speaker desires to underscore variety, extending the relevant item with an s. Oils ain't oils after all.
The quandary evokes my days on Letters and Numbers, the SBS gameshow where I did a nightly lexicographer charade. Season 1, episode 1, game 1, the letter mix was TAESOGAPS, with two contestants seeking the longest word available. One found POSTAGE, the other POSTAGES, and production jerked to a halt as rulebooks were fetched, arbiters assembled and nits were picked.
The iffy plural won the day for reasons of Phil's cheeses. Postage is an uncountable noun, unless you crave to differentiate, or gain eight points in this case. English is fickle that way, owning a slew of variant plurals, as Robert McRitchie highlighted in a recent email: "I'm arguing with a friend about the plural of forum. I say forums, and he says fora is OK. I'd value your opinion."
Forums, I voted, for reasons of style. Flogging cheese platters can't be conflated with sounding like a pompous nob. Fora belongs in a surgery, or on a Scrabble board, and should steer clear of festival panels or Pottermore chatrooms. Of course, many -um words warrant the -a makeover, such as ovum and bacterium, stratum and datum, just as others dwell along the borderline. Think quorum and symposium, maximum and cranium. Marginal cases call on house style, or your own style.
Emmy Favilla, BuzzFeed's copy chief, knows all about roguish plurals, as amplified in her excellent playbook, A World Without Whom (2017, Bloomsbury). Grind a pound of chickpeas, say, then experiment with a sequence of garlic ratios, and do you make a line of hummus, hummuses, hummi or humma? Put it this way, if no dictionary can settle on the default spelling of the Arabic import, then why should its plural be any readier to serve?
Favilla, by the way, plumped for "different types of hummus", and I stand with Emmy. Just as you won't find a rigatono in my pantry, or any capsica in my fridge. Commonsense has to count for something in this uncountable minefield. A singular graffito may be right in the puritanical sense, but if you think pedantry is the only valid measure, then the writing's on the wall.
Computer mouses or computer mice? I prefer mouses in the IT setting, but perhaps a battery of referendums will split those trickier hairs. As for octopus, the day is too short, and my word count too low, to get entangled in that leviathan. (Octopuses, so there – thanks Phil. Maybe with a selection of cheeses to follow.)
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