See that mouse next to your computer? Pretend there are two of them. What would you call them: “mice” or “mouses”?
In the first 15 years or so of its mainstream life, the computer mouse has had an uncertain plural, word watchers say. But in the current issue of English Today, linguist Alan Kaye argues that “computer mouses” is starting to win out.
Kaye takes issue with the 1999 book “Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language” (Harper Perennial, 368 pages, $15) by Steven Pinker, which stated that most English speakers either avoid the plural of computer mouse or reluctantly choose “mice.” (Most dictionaries list both “mice” and “mouses” as possible plurals for the computer instrument.)
Kaye surveyed more than 1,000 students at California State University at Fullerton, where he teaches linguistics, and he found that about 90 percent opt for “mouses” as the plural of the clicking device.
“Insofar as my own California dialect is concerned, `mouses’ is the correct form and `mice’ refers exclusively to rodents,” Kaye writes.
Bill Walsh, copy chief of the national desk at The Washington Post and author of “The Elephants of Style: A Trunkload of Tips on the Big Issues and Gray Areas of Contemporary American English” (McGraw-Hill, 238 pages, $14.95), says he is inclined to agree — even though most authoritative advice he’s seen recommends “mice.”
“I think `mice’ is an irregular plural unique to the animal,” Walsh writes by e-mail. “Once we’ve coined a new sense of it, we go by modern processes and eschew the irregular.”
“Computer mice” gets about six times as many results as “computer mouses” in Google searches, but “computer mouses” gets about six times as many results as “computer mice” in a search of newspaper articles in the Lexis-Nexis database. (Maybe some of the confusion comes from the fact that the computer mouse usually exists in solitude; you only need one to work your computer.)
This phenomenon isn’t unusual in English, as Pinker observed in “Words and Rules.” A baseball player may fly out, but an announcer says the player “flied out,” not “flew out.” You have one “silly goose” and multiple “silly gooses.” When the Walkman debuted, stores advertised that they sold “Walkmans.” And get two people in Mickey Mouse costumes together, and you have Mickey Mouses, not Mickey Mice.
Kaye calls this phenomenon “semantic bifurcation”: The same word can have different forms when it has different meanings.
You might be wondering how English got into the mouse mess to begin with — why does one mouse plus one mouse equal two mice? The problem is that in Old English, some words were made plural by changing the middle of the word rather the end. So the singular “fot” and plural “fet” in Old English became our “foot” and “feet,” and the singular “mus” and plural “mys” became “mouse” and “mice.”
The term “computer mouse” comes from somebody thinking the device resembled a rodent. Here’s another linguistic example of seeing mice: The word “muscle” comes from the same root word as “mouse” — due to “the resemblance of a flexing muscle to the movements of a mouse,” according to the American Heritage Dictionary.
Of course, some of us would have to start working out to get our muscles looking more like mice.
Endings: In his farewell address as outgoing general editor of Language Learning, a quarterly journal based at the University of Michigan, Alexander Guiora said the scientific study of language is expanding to interact more with other academic fields — including psychology, which Guiora teaches at the University of Haifa in Israel. In his address, which was published last year in Language Learning, Guiora said researchers have come to “the recognition that language is more than a spoken text, that it is more than communication, that it is behavior … that it is biologically mediated.”
Guiora says the future of the language sciences was exhibited in last fall’s “A. Guiora Annual Roundtable Conference in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language” in the Netherlands.
“The gradual change on my watch [was the journal’s] becoming an international research journal, publishing data-based empirical research in the language studies,” Guiora writes in an e-mail from Israel. In a 50th anniversary issue of Language Learning in 1998, a former editor praised Guiora’s “enthusiasm and drive” in his leadership of the journal since the late 1970s. …
Peter Ladefoged, one of the world’s leading researchers of the sounds of human languages, died last month at 80. Ladefoged was perhaps best known as the consultant to Rex Harrison for the film “My Fair Lady,” but he was respected among linguists as the author of popular textbooks on phonetics and an avid field researcher of dying languages. In a tribute at Language Log, a Web log written by academic linguists, colleague Geoffrey Pullum called Ladefoged “a tireless investigator of languages, a pioneer in archiving and digital teaching aids, an original thinker, a pillar of the International Phonetic Association, a true gentleman, [and] a wonderful human being.”
———-
Write to Nathan Bierma at onlanguage@gmail.com.
