in reply to The plural of "athlete's foot" is...

print $user->{'pedant'}
? << 'END_RANT'

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There is no plural to "athlete's foot". It is a massive noun, like "butter" or "foo". 

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: << 'END_LEVITY';

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Sure, the plural of butter is "butters" as in, "there are only two butters in this basket, but five breads." So, the plural of "athlete's foot" is "athletes' foots".

And no plural for "foo"? haven't you heard of foosball? 

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Hell, I'm not even sure if mixing here documents into trinary tests is legal, but whatever.

LAI

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Re^2: The plural of "athlete's foot" is... (on heredocs)
by Aristotle (Chancellor) on May 03, 2003 at 01:49 UTC
    Yes it is. You can use here documents anywhere a string is legal, in fact, you can even chain them: 
    print $cond ? << 'HERE' : << 'DOC';
foo
bar
HERE
baz
quux
DOC

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    Although that gets unreadable real quick like.

    Makeshifts last the longest.

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Re: Re: The plural of "athlete's foot" is...
by MrYoya (Monk) on May 02, 2003 at 20:15 UTC
    Yes, this is what I was thinking too.
    Since its a mass noun (massive noun?), it would need a quantifier word such as "cases" or "problems" to refer to multiple instances. So you would say "There are three cases of athlete's foot".

    However, you can also say "There are several itchy athlete's foots available". I think there's some kind of rule in English where you can just add an "s" or "es" to any noun to make it plural.

[reply]
      However, you can also say "There are several itchy athlete's foots available". I think there's some kind of rule in English where you can just add an "s" or "es" to any noun to make it plural.

      Maybe you meant "There are several itchy athlete's feet available."
      :-)

      No Peace Without War!
[reply]
        You're right. What I meant was that, aside from the irregularly pluralized nouns, you can add "es" or "s". For example, the word "virus" has no plural in Latin, but we pluralize it to "viruses" -- a Latin word with an Anglo suffix.

        Since "athlete's foot" is a mass noun, it was questionable whether it even had a plural. But, on page 61 of A Concise Grammar of Contemporary English by Quirk and Greenbaum, it says "Virtually all non-count nouns can be treated as count nouns when used in classificatory senses:
        There are several French wines available (= kinds of wine)

        If it's a count noun, it has a plural. I mistakenly thought that since it was a compound noun, the plural would be formed like "${noun}s" or "${noun}es". But according to this page, it appears that "athlete's foot" undergoes regular plural inflection and thus the rightmost word would become plural. According to this logic, "athlete's foot" does have a plural and that plural is "athlete's feet".
        That, and googling "athelete's feet" returns about 80x the results of "athlete's foots" ;)

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