If you, like me, are a half-ashamed watcher of various
fashion reality
shows, you might be familiar with phrases like I’d like to pair this with a navy
pant or Maybe a
smoky eye and a red lip. There is an assumption of an
implied plural when
the singular versions
of these words are used in this way; relatively few people would be
brave enough to use lipstick on only one lip. Outside of the
fashion industry, though, you’d be more likely to refer
to eyes, lips,
and pants (or trousers in British English).
There is a distinction that, with body parts, we have no problem
thinking about a single eye or a single lip, but what of a
single pant or trouser? Why do these words almost
invariably come as a plural?
Well, without knowing it, you’ve been using a plurale tantum, Latin for ‘plural
only’ and used for ‘a noun which is used only in plural form, or
which is used only in plural form in a particular sense or senses.’
These nouns are always treated grammatically as
plurals: you would say my
trousers are red rather than my trousers is red.
The list below explores some common pluralia tantum (for such is the
plural):
Looking back, to around the 16th century, there was once a
singular trouser– or,
rather, a singular trouse; the –er form was always plural and
may have been modelled on ‘drawers’. You might
expect trouse to
have originally designated a
single leg, in much the manner of sleeve, but this is not the case.
A trouse was not a
world away from modern day trousers, being ‘a close-fitting
article of attire for the buttocks and thigh (divided below so as
to form a separate covering for each thigh), to the lower
extremities of which stockings (when worn) were attached’. But at
the same time, trouses was used in its plural
form for the same object. Other similar garments are among
today’s pluralia
tantum: pants, shorts, leggings,jeans, flares, tights, overalls, dungarees etc.
The word scissors dates
back to the 15th century, and in its
first-known uses appeared either as singular (cysour, sysowre, and sizzer are early examples) or
plural. The latter quickly overtook the former in popularity, and
today you are only likely to encounter the singular scissor as a verb (to cut, or in
a figurative sense)
or used attributively to
form a compound noun such as scissor kick. Many other two-bladed
tools are also pluralia
tantum: pliers, forceps, shears, tweezers, tongs.
Obviously the singular noun glass exists, but when referring
to eyewear, you will only hear about glasses; even the fashion
world doesn’t seem yet to have started recommending that people
wear a chic glass. The
same is true of binoculars, spectacles,
and goggles.
As with other pluralia
tantum, a singular becomes available if the noun isprefixed by
‘pair of’: a pair of glasses
is an expensive purchase, rather than a pair of glasses are an expensive
purchase. Having said that, you are likely to
hear pair of
glasses treated as both a singular and a plural: the
Oxford Dictionaries New Monitor Corpus (a
research programme which collects around 150 million words of
current English in use each month) records roughly equal instances
of pair of glasses
is and pair of
glasses are.
Looking more broadly in the world of attire,
we speak of clothes,
but never of a single clothe (a word which exists only
as a verb). Cloth exists as a singular noun,
but meaning ‘woven or felted fabric, made from wool, cotton, or a
similar fibre’, rather than ‘a garment’. This was not always the
case. In the late 14th century, cloth could be used to refer to a
singlegarment,
robe, or coat; this use is found in Piers Plowman, Wycliffe’s translation
of the Psalms, and the works of Chaucer. Now, to quote the
etymology note in the Oxford
English Dictionary (OED), ‘clothes remains a collective
plural without a singular; to express the latter, a phrase such as
“article of clothing” is used’.
Pluralia tantum don’t
necessarily end in ‘s’, of course, particularly if they have kept
their plural formation from another or an earlier language.Marginalia –
‘notes written in the margins of a text’ – comes from Latin, which
also had the singular marginalis. The singular did not make
its way into English, however, and thus marginalia joins the ranks
of pluralia tantum,
where it is joined by other Latin borrowings including juvenilia(‘works
produced by an author or artist while still young’)
and literati (well-educated
people who are interested in literature). Some words which follow a
similar pattern and are most commonly used as plurals (paraphernalia and regalia,
for instance) can actually also be used in the singular.
Although there is also the option of folks (often
seen in old folks’
home, for instance), folk is also itself exclusively a
plural: in current English, you cannot have one folk. The word dates back to Old
English, and is ofGermanic origin.
Pluralia tantum needn’t
be tangible objects; shenanigans is
commonly held to be an example. The word is of uncertain origin,
and means ‘secret or dishonest activity or manoeuvring’ or ‘silly
or high-spirited behaviour; mischief’. The singular shenanigan is not in common use,
and is not included in OxfordDictionaries.com,
but the history of shenanigans actually follows the
same pattern as clothes, albeit over a shorter period.
The earliest known example of the word is from an 1855 article
in Town Talk: ‘Are you
quite sure? No shenanigan?’. This usage is found in various
sources, including the letters of Mark
Twain, throughout the late-19th and
early-20th centuries; in recent years,
it has fallen out of use almost completely.
The singular loggerhead exists
in reference to a variety of turtle and a variety of shrike, and is
an archaic term
meaning ‘a foolish person’, but is nowadays most commonly met in
the phrase at
loggerheads. This means ‘in violent dispute or
disagreement’, and is never found as at loggerhead. It has been suggested
that this use of loggerheads relates to a late
17th-century sense of loggerhead meaning ‘long-handled
iron instrument for heating liquids and tar’, when wielded as a
weapon.
Speaking of phrases, you’re unlikely to hear about cahoots outside
of the informal phrase in
cahoots (‘colluding or conspiring together secretly’),
and you won’t discover a single cahoot in current English,
although the word was once used that way. The etymology is
uncertain, but a link has been suggested with the
French cahute, meaning
‘hut, shack’.
You can make amends but
you cannot make an amend; the latter now exists only as a
verb. The noun amends comes from
the Old
Frenchamendes meaning ‘penalties,
fine’; in Old French, it was the plural ofamende, but only the plural found its
way into English. You might make amends by paying damages; while damage is a common mass noun, in
the sense of ‘a sum of money claimed or awarded in compensation for
a loss or injury’, the word is now only found in the plural.
Probably from the Irish smidirín, smithereens means
‘small pieces’ (almost invariably in the context of
destruction; the table got
smashed to smithereens, for example). Smithers is
also used, but you will not findsmither or smithereen in the singular –
although the transitive
verbsmithereen (‘to
smash or blow up into tiny fragments’) is included in theOED.
Although the verb thank is common, especially in
the exclamation thank
you, you wouldn’t give somebody a single thank – unless you happened to be
in Ancient Britain and using the Old
English thanc, from
which the modern word stemmed. Again, the singular was dropped
eventually – although examples are found as late as the
19th century.
There are any number of compound
nouns and phrases that are chiefly or always found as
plurals, even though the constituent words
may often be used in the singular. Among them are bare-bones, arts
and crafts, bacon
and eggs, good
manners, bad
manners, baked
beans, bits
and pieces, goods
and chattels, glad
rags, halcyon days, high
spirits, high
jinks, jazz
hands, ladies and
gentlemen, and last
rites. Conversely, there are some singularia tantum; nouns that are
never pluralized. These include dust, wealth, andinformation. But that is for another
article…
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