Dragaera

Kragar (was: A thought concerning Skinter's future...)

Kenneth Gorelick pulmon at comcast.net
Tue Nov 11 16:05:59 PST 2003

Thank you Dr. Whom!

It is interesting that in French the proper word is also a plural, "les 
selles"--one never speaks of  this in the singular. However, in 
colloquial French, the well-known term "merde" has a diminutive form 
used to describe a single fex: "merdon" (similar to lardon) and best 
translated as "turd".

We may have the beginnings of a truly scatological dictionary here!
On Nov 11, 2003, at 1:02 PM, Mark A Mandel wrote:

> On Tue, 11 Nov 2003, Kenneth Gorelick wrote:
>
> #Since this seems to be a linguistically talented group, can anyone,
> #using the below hypotheses, provide me with the singular of "feces"?
>
> In Latin the word is "faeces", which is the spelling used in British
> English. The Latin singular is "faex". If English had imported the
> latter we would spell it "fex" west of the Water; but we didn't. In
> English there is no singular form.
>
> -- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and
>    Philological Busybody
>    a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel
>
>