A woman drove past me recently in a car with a license plate holder reading “ALUMNI — BOSTON COLLEGE”. It’s a perfectly standard thing to have on one’s car — although BC was a bit of a surprise given that I’m in San Diego –, but it also presented a minor choice point in my day. I could either think of it as totally unremarkable and move on, or I could fret over its grammaticality.*
It looked like this, except mounted on a car instead of floating in a featureless void.
The problem with the license plate holder is a minor one that you’d easily never know if you’re unfamiliar with Latin. I was unaware of it until college, and even then it was perhaps only because I went to a school so fond of Latin as a scholarly language that our degrees were not BAs but ABs (Artium Baccalaureus instead of Bachelor of Arts) and our diplomas were written entirely in Latin.**
Anyway, the problem is that alumni is, at least in Latin, plural. Furthermore, it’s masculine (or mixed-gender). For a single graduate, the Latinally accurate form would be alumnus for a male or alumna for a female. And for multiple female graduates, the Latinally accurate form would be alumnae.
I imagine many of you readers already knew that, but maybe you didn’t. If I’m being perfectly honest, I wish I didn’t. Why? Because I can’t help noticing it. I suspect that a majority of the English speaking population doesn’t think that alumni has even the hint of inherent plurality about it. I’m looking at the Corpus of Contemporary American English right now, and there are 70 hits for “an alumni”, 61 of them in writing.*** That’s more common than “an alumna” and “an alum”, and only 29 hits less than “an alumnus”. Quite simply, singular alumni is standard in all but the most formal of Englishes, and I’m not sure it’s non-standard even there.
Why is singular alumni standard? Because it fits better with English. We don’t really like gender on our nouns (at least not anymore — Old English was fond of it). And we don’t really care about adjusting the plurality of borrowed words, especially not from Latin — see agenda or stamina. Rather than having to remember a fairly idiosyncratic gender/number system, it’s easier to treat alumni as a base singular form with a zero-plural, just like strong ol’ Germanic words like sheep or fish. And it saves university bookstores from having to stock four different license plate holders.
![[EX-CUSE: Syracuse Alumni]](http://motivatedgrammar.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/ex-cuse.jpg?w=490 "ex-cuse")
It’s a tangent, but this pun is almost enough to make me wish I had gone to Syracuse.
To return to the point of the opening paragraph, I can’t, much as I’d like to, stop myself from correcting singular alumni. It’s not even like it’s a choice, or a conscious decision — I see singular alumni, and my brain says “alumnus” or “alumna”. That much is automatic.
Where the choice comes in is whether I say something about it or judge people for it. In almost every situation, I don’t. For seemingly everybody, singular alumni is acceptable. For many of the rest, they’re okay when it’s used in a reasonable situation (such as when you don’t know the gender of the person buying the item). It’s only in very formal or very edited English (or around close friends who I think will be interested) that I would raise the issue. In other situations, bringing it up would just seem like an attempt to show off my passing familiarity with Latin, which would be a especially pathetic boast.
This is not linguistic whateverism. I’m not saying that editing is stupid or that nothing should be corrected. Editing, I can’t stress enough, is critical. But my point is that for all of you who insist that, say, it’s for its kills you and you can’t stop yourself from correcting it: yes, you can. We’re not beasts; we have self-control. When it’s something trifling, or in an ephemeral setting, or clearly not indicative of a larger ignorance of the language, you can and should let it pass. You’ll be happier for it, and you might even see a drop in your overall peevishness levels.
–
*: This is a false dichotomy; there is clearly a third way — to base a blog post upon it, thereby spending far more effort than if I had been content to simply complain about its grammaticality. Given that I’m going to berate that choice as a foolish use of one’s time, I’m aware of the irony in mine.
**: In fact, we are so enamored of traditional uses of Latin that to this day the salutorian of the class delivers their graduation speech entirely in Latin. The graduating seniors are given a copy of the speech in both Latin and English, with the Latinate portion marked for where to laugh, cheer, applaud, etc. I don’t think the rest of the audience is given this cheat sheet, thereby creating the illusion that we all speak Latin fluently enough to understand it in oratorical form.
I know, it sounds stupid and pretentious and ridiculous, and it is. But it was also great silly fun to overlaugh at something incomprehensible, sort of like being a member of a studio audience clapping at “APPLAUSE” signs must be. I highly recommend you petition your alma mater to do the same.
***: Many of these are in noun-noun compounds like “an alumni club” or “an alumni trustee”, where the grammatical number of alumni is unclear. Though my original intuition is that it’s being thought of as plural in these cases, English does tend to disprefer plural first nouns in noun-noun compounds (cf. mousetrap, cowcatcher, leafblower). Also, if one were to replace alumni in these compounds with some standardly pluralized noun like student, it’d be “student club”, not “students club”. Thus, I’m inclined to think of these examples as further, though weaker, evidence of singular usage alumni.
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August 22, 2012 at 11:54 am
pros write
Weird. I don’t know why, but “alumni” bothers me in a way almost no other prescriptive faux pas does. I don’t correct anyone as that doesn’t fit my world view. But, like you, I can’t NOT notice. (I also studied Latin for years so maybe that’s the issue.)
I mentioned the issue of Latin plurals a couple of days ago here: http://proswrite.com/2012/08/20/pros-master-the-etiquette-of-agreement/.
August 22, 2012 at 11:57 am
Paul Clapham
I’m an alumnus of a certain university, and my daughter is an alumna of the same university. (And she studied Latin so she would know the difference.) So when she graduated, I was unsure whether to address her as “fellow alumnus” or “fellow alumna”. Both of those seemed problematic, for different reasons. So (as you said) I just held my tongue.
And English doesn’t mind plural first nouns in noun-noun compounds if the plural in question is an irregular one. As an ex-math guy you may be aware of “automata theory”.
August 22, 2012 at 12:02 pm
Rob Simmons
In my recollection, the translation only came afterwords: for our actual graduation ceremony we just got an annotated speech of the salutatorian’s address where the footnotes said stuff like Ridere (e.g. “hahaha”).
August 22, 2012 at 12:29 pm
Delft
While “an alumni” is wrong (unless a single noun follows – association, party, network etc.) and I’d notice it, I don’t see the problem with the license plate or the T-shirt. I’d suppose it refers to the alumni association, or the group of alumni of the university.
August 22, 2012 at 12:36 pm
Mike Pope
I maintain (http://mikepope.com/blog/DisplayBlog.aspx?permalink=1890) that speakers of English are not really obliged to know the morphological rules of the languages we borrow terms from, so as to “properly” pluralize/genderize/conjugate/whatever them. That doesn’t mean imo that it’s incorrect to use formal plurals (or genders) when one knows them, but it does mean (again, imo) that it’s not really fair to criticize people who decline (haha) to memorize a bunch of oddball plurals and gender endings.
FWIW, even those who make a show of learning foreign-based plurals seem more inclined to do that for Latin (-i) and French (-eaux) than, say, for Russian (plural in Russian of “apparatchik”?) or Japanese (plural in Japanese of “yen”?)
And Gabe, pretty much entirely off topic but speaking of clever college t-shirt slogans, my daughter went to Indiana U but absolutely forbade me to get the very popular t-shirt emblazoned with “Hoosier Daddy”. :-)
August 22, 2012 at 1:18 pm
Jonathon
I seem to remember reading about some studies that showed that English speakers sometimes tolerate irregular plurals in compounds, as Paul Clapham said above. Something like mice catcher is more acceptable than rats catcher, but there’s some variation, and some plurals still sound odd. Thus we have toothbrushes but teeth whiteners. I think in the case of alumni club it’s that people think of alumni as singular, not that they tolerate the plural in a compound.
August 22, 2012 at 1:50 pm
Paul Clapham
It was in one of Steven Pinker’s books where I read that, but I couldn’t tell you which one.
August 22, 2012 at 2:16 pm
John Cowan
The Pinker book is Words and Rules.
The T-shirt can be interpreted as an imperative, “Excuse Syracuse alumni”, in which case the plural is quite sound.
As far as I know, foreign plurals in English are nowadays limited to Latin words, Greek words, Hebrew cherub and seraph (and never mind Ogden Nash, whose little process servers hope to grow up into great big bailiffim and sheriffim), and some technical Italian terms (tempi, yes, -but hardly banditti any more). The Beaux’ Stratagem would be The Boyfriends’ Trick.
August 22, 2012 at 3:09 pm
the ridger
How do you know she and her SO weren’t both BC alumni?;-)
August 22, 2012 at 6:34 pm
Nancy Friedman (@Fritinancy)
If only to keep myself from losing it in traffic, I’ve always interpreted those license-plate-frame brags as abbreviations for “alumni association.” In other words, the frame isn’t saying “I’m an alumna/us of X college” but rather “I affiliate with the alumni of X college.”
August 23, 2012 at 3:40 am
H. S. Gudnason
There’s also the further complication that those of us who were taught to pronounce (however badly) classical (as opposed to church) Latin were taught to pronounce the feminine plural as (English) alumnI, while the masculine plural was alumnEE, So not only were there four forms, but the pronunciation of the English and Latin plurals did a weird double-flip semi-overlap. (Clearly a sport for the next Olympics.)
My practice has been to avoid the words as much as possible, and just says, “I went to…”
I’ve also been known very rarely to refer to my undergraduate and graduate universities as my almae matres, but then I always giggle.
August 23, 2012 at 5:53 am
Marc Leavitt
My assumption: The plate holder refers to the “alumni association” of which she’s a member; also, political correctness aside, both genders are included in the masculine plural for convenience, if for no other reason. But yes, it bothers me too, and I always mentally correct in similar cases; and no, I would never correct anyone in conversation.
August 23, 2012 at 3:03 pm
Emily
I do know the difference, but not wanting to annoy people, I just use the word “alum” in all situations. But if I were to get a license plate holder for my car, I would want it to say “alumna,” which is why it’s probably good I don’t have much school spirit.
Also, I now wish I’d gone to your university.
August 26, 2012 at 7:27 am
Daniel
My spouse has a graduate degree from the (coed) library science program at Simmons College. The undergraduate program and the business school at Simmons are both all-female, though, so references to former students often are addressed to “alumnae/i.”
August 30, 2012 at 2:15 pm
Daniel
First of all, where’d the other Daniel come from? :-)
There are two colleges here in Raleigh that are female-only: Meredith College and Peace College. Both have license plate holders to indicate that the driver has graduated, and neither say “Alumnae”. Meredith uses the singular Alumna, while Peace uses “Alumni”. I can only assume that Peace is implicitly accepting the notion that “Alumni” in English can be a singular that does not specify gender. Had they been intending to pluralize it, presumably they’d have gone with “Alumnae”.
(Peace College, for anyone who cares, has gone coed starting with the Fall 2012 semester. However, it is still true and always will be true that there are no male graduates of Peace College, because the institution renamed itself William Peace University at the same time that went co-ed.)
Finally, I would note that if I went to a university that handed out crib sheets so students would know how to respond to a speech that they didn’t understand, I’d probably try to organize a large group of people responding inappropriately — applauding at the wrong times, booing instead of laughing, et cetera. And if by some miracle I was the salutatorian, I’d probably get someone to translate the speech into some other language like Chinese just to heighten how pretentious and absurd the whole thing was. All of this is assuming, mind you, that I actually bothered to go to the graduation ceremony, which in fact I did not do when I graduated from college.
September 1, 2012 at 3:44 pm
Brian Baresch (@Editer)
Regarding “English does tend to disprefer plural first nouns in noun-noun compounds (cf. mousetrap, cowcatcher, leafblower)” — I wouldn’t say it tends that way; I’d say it’s all over the map. Common counterexamples include farmers market, citizens band, teachers college, workers compensation. I suspect that the choice of singular or plural when these compounds were formed and gained acceptance is some combination of euphony and simple chance. But that’s nothing more than a guess.
September 1, 2012 at 5:53 pm
Dan M.
@Brian Baresch, For every one of your examples, I’d take the ‘-s’ sound in those words as genitive of singular nouns, not plurals. A farmer’s market is a market run by (i.e. *belonging to*) farmers rather than grocers. CB is the band *allocated to* citizens for use of radio. There are colleges providing instruction *to* teachers. Payment for disabilities is a legal requirement of what to give *to workers* instead of them suing for tort.
September 4, 2012 at 7:44 am
Daniel
To add to Dan M. point about genitive vs. plural, I would point out that worker compensation is also known as workman’s compensation. Since the plural of workman is presumably workmen, it is not possible to parse the phrase pronounced “workman’s compensation” as a plural, only as a genitive.
That being said, it’s unclear in most of these cases whether it is the genitive form of the singular or plural noun, since they are pronounced identically (even the distinction between “workman’s comp” and “workmen’s comp” is all but nonexistent when spoken). You’ll find plenty of examples of each of these phrases written with the apostrophe before the s, after the s, or nonexistent. I’m not sure which of these methods is most common, and checking Google makes me question how trustworthy the results are (for example, farmers market and farmers’ market return the same number of hits; the same holds true for teachers college and teachers’ college, and for citizens band and citizens’ band.)
September 4, 2012 at 8:41 am
Dan M.
Yeah, using Google hit counts is largely meaningless these days, and completely so in the case of a this distinction; Google normalizes to searching for anything with the given root of the word (and then maybe tweaking the order of results depending on the exact form).