Q. I’ve polled all the editors in the building on this, plus checked your manual. Other than rewriting
the sentence entirely so it wouldn’t matter if we had “is”
or “are,” no one is quite sure how to handle it. I hope you can help, wish this
were a chat room. :) Is a term like “award(s)” plural or singular? To me, since
the reader will “read” it as plural, it should be plural, but that’s
the advertising copy editor in me. As for grammatical correctness, I don’t really know if it’s
a plural word or not, since technically the “s” is only inferred, right?
A. A term ending in “(s)” is both plural and singular. If you must use such a device
(and it can be a useful shorthand), you have to be prepared to adjust the surrounding context as necessary: for example, “the
award(s) is (are) accounted for.” A parenthetical plural verb must correspond to the parenthetical ending.
But that’s an awkward example. In general, avoid such shorthand unless it can be used simply and effectively,
as in the following example:
Place an “about the author(s)” statement on the copyright page (usually page
iv).
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. My boyfriend and I are having a battle royal over the use of apostrophes in plural names. In his PhD dissertation he repeatedly refers to a family by the name of Wallace. When he refers to them in the plural, he insists that the correct form is “the Wallace’s,” which seems entirely incorrect to me. I hold that it should be “the Wallaces,” just like “the McDonalds” or “the McPartlands” or “the DeVitos.” He is backing up his position with the example “the G.I.s,” which he insists should be pluralized as “the G.I.’s.” Please help. This is ruining our dinner conversation!
A. Usually in such arguments, the woman is right. Yours is no exception. The plural of names of persons and other capitalized nouns is usually formed with the addition of s or es. An apostrophe is never used to form the plural of family names. Write “the Wallaces,” “the Joneses,” the “Jordans,” etc. See paragraph 7.9 of the seventeenth edition of CMOS for the full statement of the applicable rule. As for G.I., Chicago style is GI (no periods), the plural of which we write as GIs. See paragraphs 10.4 and 7.15.
[reply from Q.]: Ohhhh thanks!!!! I can’t wait to show this to [my boyfriend].
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Greetings from New Zealand. May I please ask you what is the plural of “thesis” and whether this word is of Latin or Greek origin? Many thanks.
A. For this sort of thing, we at the University of Chicago Press must rely on the lexicographers. The plural, according to Merriam-Webster and others, is “theses.” As for origin, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “thesis” was
[o]riginally and properly, according to ancient writers, [t]he setting down of the foot or lowering of the hand in beating time, and hence (as marked by this) the stress or ictus; the stressed syllable of a foot in a verse; a stressed note in music.
Among the ancient writers offered as proof are the authors of Greek fragments studied by Rudolf Westphal in his Die Fragmente und die Lehrsätze der griechischen Rhythmiker from 1861. Later Latin writers inverted this meaning, but the one that has generally survived today is the setting down, not of the foot, but of a proposition. So Greek it is.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]