Unfortunately my totals were not raised this week and so my number of Aylesburys visited remains at 5. I was wondering, however, what is the actual plural of Aylesbury?
It is possible to have a flock of Aylesbury ducks, shortened to Aylesburys or Aylesburies, depending on the website you look at. I decided to search this problem out and decide democratically which term to use. Language evolves over time, based on precidents and norms, so I was not ready to break this tradition by selecting a plural at random. Many words can become candidates of the plural for Aylesbury. Aylesburys, because it is the simple adding of an S to a proper noun to pluralise it. Aylesburies could be seen as a worthy candidate as well, like 'berry', taking off the y and adding -ies would also be a logical progression of the word. Aylesburi is also an unlikely candidate, pluralising in a rare english manner. You will see in the graphs below, my other guesses as to what Aylesbury pluralised actually should be. Put simply all I had to do was enter each word into google and find out how many hits each search returned.
The graph that emerged was this.
A conclusive victory for Aylesburys, you might think. However, what about all the possessive forms of this word? "Aylesburys town council" typed by lazy people including Bucks' County Council who out the apostophe. What about all the slovenly people who merge the words, 'Aylesbury' and 'is' to make "aylesburys, like, rubbish"? (also missing the important capital of a proper noun, tut, tut) I then went through and sifted out all these wasted words to make an adjusted graph.
The result is not as conclusive as the first, however I think it can be safely said that "Aylesburys" is the most used and therefore could be seen to be the most grammatically correct plural form of the word that is Aylesbury. Therefore I shall use it in later posts.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
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