The Galloping Plural

A staff member of the English journal Motor Sport, reporting on a road test of a new car, remarked on the convenient placing of the car’s “lamps-dipper.” Then there came, in another issue, a reference to a “lamps-switch.” This term was harder to accept. The impacted s’s could never have arisen in spoken English.

What then was I to think of “expenses account,” which upreared itself in an otherwise innocuous sentence praising the Jaguar car? Soon after, my suspicions were really aroused when I came on both singular and plural forms in similar contexts: one advertiser announced a “2-litres” model, while another announced his as simply a “2-litre” job.

When, finally, I came upon a reference to a “parcels-shelf,” I decided it was high time to go to the Oxford Dictionary. Here I found momentary comfort. “Parcel post,” said the good book. “(At first called erroneously Parcels post.) That branch of the postal service which undertakes the carriage and distribution of parcels.”

A friend of mine took a job in the Pentagon; when he wrote me next it was from the office of something called the Institute for Defense Analyses. And I learned from his letter that the Institute for Defense Analyses was an agency of another organization known as the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group.

I wrote my friend that I was delighted to discover that our government was not limiting itself to one niggardly defense analysis. But, I asked, why only one evaluation of weapons systems? Why not Weapons Systems Evaluations? Or, for that matter. Weapons Systems Evaluations Groups? And, further, why should we have a department of only one defense? Why not an up-to-date Department of Defenses? Known for short as the Defenses Department?

I spoke in jest. I was shortly to be answered in dead earnest. The thing was spreading. A cartoonist presented a picture of Uncle Sam nearly swamped in a cloud of dust rising from the flying heels of “Soviet Russia,” and the cloud was labeled “Missiles Race for Survival.”

The trend continued. The Douglas Aircraft Company advertised somewhat uncertainly for “missiles engineers” to work on “missile projects” in a “Missiles Division.” The Los Angeles Times sagely straddled by reporting “Missile Secrets” in a headline and “missiles production” in the text underneath, while the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reversed the procedure with “Weapons Tests” in a headline and “weapon tests” in the text.

Well, sir, it was only the beginning. Everybody began to dabble in the delights of the supererogatory plural. On August 22, 1957, the Pasadena Star-News gave us a sophisticated flash on “Rackets Probers,” but three months later regressed to the language of its fathers with “Racket Hearings.” In the world of books, the Los Angeles Times managed a masterful compromise with a stylish headline announcing a “New Books Section,” and a more modest textual reference to a “Book Section.”

The aesthetes, glad as always to pursue the novel, went over resoundingly to a “Pacific Arts Museum” in Los Angeles; but journalism, represented by the Los Angeles Examiner, maintained editorial balance by reporting it impartially in a headline as an “Art Museum” and in text as an “Arts Museum.”

The educators, ever aware of the need to keep up to date, reported a new “admissions idea” in their periodical Higher Education; but equally aware of education’s duty to the past, described it in text as an “admission idea.”

The Supreme Court was given credit by the Associated Press for “quashing” a “Freight Rates Law”; an English firm advertised a Christmas “Greetings Card”; and an American mail-order house advertised “Shoes Laces.” And why sports car, not sport car?

Well, I am ready. On the day that Motor Sport comes to me dressed in its new cover as Motors Sport, I will cancel my subscription.