Words that are “borrowed” into English from other languages become naturalized English words and follow the rules of English grammar—regular. A problem can occur when the borrowed word is a noun ending in . -S but is singular in its original language: such a word will always sound like a plural to an English speaker.
The literal meaning of ‘biceps’ is ‘two heads’, referring to a muscle with two parts attached to bone.
An example is namea word taken directly from Greek ending in -S and are few. Since it is often used as an uncountable noun (it goes with a singular verb, like clap), it’s easy to overlook the question of whether the word is considered singular or plural. But many English speakers have “fixed” what was never broken by creating the “singular” form. reputation (as in “we rarely hear that kind of kudos anymore”), done by deleting -S because name is considered—erroneously—plural.
Latin also has singular nouns ending in . -Sincluding anatomical words arm, tricepsAnd quadriceps muscle. These words are all singular in Latin and were borrowed in the 1600s or later, during a time when linguists preferred pure Latin forms for scientific and anatomical vocabulary (another example). from this period is clip). If these words were borrowed three or four centuries ago, they are likely to become more complex over time, but the academic language of the Renaissance was Latin, meaning words borrowed from Later periods often retain their pure Latin form.
The ceps IN biceps, tricepsAnd quadriceps muscle comes from the Latin word for “head”; literal meaning of arm is “two-headed”, referring to a muscle with two parts attached to bone (this definition of head is “the end of the muscle closest to its origin”).
But, just like the back formation is created reputation from namesome people now use arm when referring to the muscles of an arm, as if arm is a plural word:
A 17-year-old boy from Skokie was shot in the right thigh, while a 19-year-old man from Evanston had a bullet wound in his left bicep. —Ashlee Rezin, Chicago Sun Times, June 20, 2016
Less than a two-hour drive from Boston, Cape Cod looks like an arm curled up on a biceps… —Tom Barber, Esquire (UK), July 2016
In reality, arm is used often enough that it is included in the dictionary, where it is defined as a synonym of arm. The first recorded use was in 1939.
The interesting way, quadrilateral frequently used for quadriceps muscle, and retain the plural structure. English speakers have somehow decided that two heads arm is a single muscle but four heads quadriceps muscle are four muscles—a difference that makes more sense linguistically than anatomically.
Careful use of language will always earn you fame, so you may want to use that bicep to grab a dictionary from time to time.
Categories: Usage Notes
Source: vothisaucamau.edu.vn
