Geek and Nerd Humor

As an English plural thesauri is mostly just an affectation. The natural plural is thesauruses.

Conventionalization is a gradual process in which a word progressively permeates a larger and larger speech community, becoming part of ever more people's linguistic repetoire. As part of its becoming more familiar to more people, a newly borrowed word gradually adopts sound and other characteristics of the borrowing language as speakers who do not know the source language accommodate it to their own linguistic systems. In time, people in the borrowing community do not perceive the word as a loanword at all. Generally, the longer a borrowed word has been in the language, and the more frequently it is used, the more it resembles the native words of the language.

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words04/structure/borrowed.html

Quote:

As an English plural thesauri is mostly just an affectation. The natural plural is thesauruses.

Quote:

Conventionalization is a gradual process in which a word progressively permeates a larger and larger speech community, becoming part of ever more people's linguistic repetoire. As part of its becoming more familiar to more people, a newly borrowed word gradually adopts sound and other characteristics of the borrowing language as speakers who do not know the source language accommodate it to their own linguistic systems. In time, people in the borrowing community do not perceive the word as a loanword at all. Generally, the longer a borrowed word has been in the language, and the more frequently it is used, the more it resembles the native words of the language.

http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words04/structure/borrowed.html

In the case of pluralizing 'thesaurus', all I said (or, at least, meant to say) is that at this point in time 'thesauri' is still the most accepted pluralization, that saying, let alone writing, 'thesauruses' is considered a sign of ignorance and a student does well to remember that when submitting something in writing.

InfraBlue wrote: Well, thesaurus is the Latin translation of the Greek word thesauros, so the Latin plural would be thesauri, as it is in English. In Greek the plural would be thesauroi.

Fifty years from now? Who knows? It may seen quaintly old-fashioned to say 'thesauri' instead of the good ole 'Murrican 'thesauruses.' But I submit that that day is not here yet.

Words do not change overnight, the process of change is evolutionary.

First Known Use: circa 1823

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/thesaurus

I don't get it....

However, there is a process involved here which includes a passage of time. Words do not change overnight,

tsarstepan wrote:

I don't get it....

I'm not surprised. Any non-unix geeks won't know the reference, which makes it a truly geek/nerd joke (hopefully worthy of the thread)

SELECT * FROM Holidays WHERE Merry = (select MAX(Merry));

Well, thesaurus is the Latin translation of the Greek word thesauros, so the Latin plural would be thesauri, as it is in English. In Greek the plural would be thesauroi.