" Next, more physical comedy from Electrolite, as I manage to slip on a banana peel, poke myself in the eye with a sharp stick, and fall down the stairs. "

LOL. I had my own James Nicoll moment yesterday when, while opening a box I received in the mail, I managed to punch myself in the eye. Luckily not hard enough to blacken it, but it did hurt and I felt really stupid.

Ah, humanity.

MKK

Ah.

Well.

That does explain it.

Since 1980, I have been "editrix" on the Net -- since ARPA days. So back when Hotmail first opened, I got "editrix@hotmail.com". Much to my confusion, at one point a few years ago I kept getting odd mail to that address complaining that the correspondents had "paid their subscriptions" but weren't being sent passwords. No one responded to my mail asking them what they were talking about -- until one finally, sheepishly, fessed up as to what was going on. Apparently a BDSM site (rather stylish -- I went and looked) had a bad "mailto" link that should have gone to "editrix@whateversitethatwas.com" and instead went to my Hotmail address. We two editrii corresponded and worked it out. And I didn't even have to threaten her with my whip.

editrices, surely. That's one correction I have waited for years to make

And I discovered one can't correct typos made from a sticky keyboard in these comments, so left what I typed as it was.

Yet another instance of the bizarre recent mania for pluralizing all Latin words in "-ii". Over on rec.arts.sf.fandom, we've just had "cervii", "penii", and "cactii". Remember, folks, it's only stuff whose singular actually ends in "-ius"!

Urm....David...since we seem to be being pedantic (and isn't it fun?), I *think* the ending of the noun is still "-us", it's simply that the *root* of the noun ends in "-i-".

Ergo: servus --> servi; Cornelius --> Cornelii

jennie - not to play More Pedantic Than Thou, but technically that would be the stem, not the root. Chewing either will send you into a grammatical frenzy, though.

jennie: You are of course quite correct; I was trying to avoid bogging people down in Latin details. (Such as the fact that some "-us" pluralizes as "-es" and some as "-us" with a long u...but I digress.)

Christopher,

You are quite correct, of course, and I can be awarded some hours with my Allen & Greenough for imprecise terminology.

But a grammatical frenzy sounds a bit like fun!

David,

Understood about bogging down in the details -- I mentioned it because your initial statement caused me a minor moment of boggle, as I tried frantically to remember whether there was a specific -ius class of nouns, or whether the noun in question were more or less regular -us masculine nouns (Second Declension, which I usually think of as the first, because I learned it before I learned the First Declension, so now I think of it as the -os -us group of nouns...and who is digressing now?).

And some pluralize as -ra, as corpora and opera.

Actually, Vicki, those are both neuters and as neuters of both second and third declension do, they pluralize as "-a". (The "r" is part of the stem.)