Gooses and Meese

By Fred Prout

Not to seem like a show off, but, I think I have a passing acquaintance with the English language. I know quite a few words, and, usually which ones go first, which ones make you laugh, which ones make you cry and, most importantly, which ones make you think. It’s the little nuances that get me. Trying to figure out where to put a comma sometimes puts me in a coma. (Parenthetically speaking), I’m not always certain what to do with parentheses. You know, the little smileys that stand up.

I have had personal experience with colons and have a semi colon. Someone recently replied to one of my stories and pointed out that my participle was dangling. I was embarrassed and turned the camera off. Then I realized that if they were so smart they could see I was wearing a diphthong. I think sometimes people do stupid stuff and end up paying a sin tax.

The idea for this story started this morning while I was walking Ginger. For those of you who don’t know, I share ownership of this really smart eight pound dog with my sweetheart. Since I do the walking and carry the baggies I own the back half. Anyway, we were walking and before us was a pair of gooses honking their brains out. I know they were not Canada gooses because they didn’t go “Honk honk eh.” Before you get your knickers in a knot, I have always referred to them as gooses, so, gooses they are. I know, smarty pants, they should be geese. But then , since I’m getting worked up, why aren’t multiple mooses called meese? If a pair or more of louses are lice, can you own two hice? Like one house is a rental?

The deeper I delve into this conundrum, the more confused I get. I mean if a baby pig is a piglet, let’s do away with calling puppies and kittens and call them doglets and catlets. Or baby chickens are chicklets. Makes sense to me. I got so involved with this lunacy that I consulted Boggle. They answered my query about pluralizing animals with the following:

A murder of crows; a congregation of alligators; a fluffle of wild bunnie,an unkindness of ravens; a quiver of cobras; a drove of donkeys; an army of frogs; a tower of giraffes; a conspiracy of lemurs; a pandemonium of parrots; a business of ferrets.

There’s got to be some rules for all this. Help me out if you know what they are. Who decided on a crash of rhinoceroses? Was it someone who actually saw one of the beasts crashing through the brush? That I could understand. But why are baby goats and baby humans called kids?

I get confused by a whole lot of other stuff too. Like when people proudly wear their sweat shirts that proclaim that they graduated from, let’s say “UNIVERSITY OF MARS. Then the additional word that I don’t understand.
ALUMNI. I checked Boggle and it/ they/ he/she said that a single graduate is an ALUMNUS. If you tell me you are the ALUMNI, I infer that you are the only person to have ever graduated. Doesn’t sound right to me. You are the only one that graduated from that school? You are the entire graduating class of one ? No offense, but, there is just no way I would let that be known.

But hey, the people looking at the shirt didn’t graduate from there either. Maybe they were busy matriculating instead of studying. Yeah, we’ll go with that. So if any of my vast multitude of readers can help me understand any of this , I would certainly appreciate hearing from you.

By the way, does anybody know if a thigh roid is a low hanging hem roid?