Word: plurality
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...R.S.V. translators (four of the 30 are women) refused to play games with God. They use inclusive terms only when the manuscripts clearly intend to speak of humans in general. To avoid "he" or "him" in these cases, many verses use plural pronouns. Unfortunately, the third-person-plural wordings are less personal and often less pointed than the singular forms. The word man, which occurs in many well-known verses of the R.S.V., is replaced by such synonyms as "mortal" or "humanity...
...Henry Rosovsky's view of the modern American research university is something like the popular view of the U.S. Marine Corps. Harvard, and a few institutions like it, are the few and the proud, an elite handful of educational institutions. We--Rosovsky has a penchant for the first person plural--advance the front lines of human knowledge, and we never wallow in the trenches...
...churches in Africa and Asia had differing views on women but united to confront the West on other issues. The most striking example was a decision to end long-standing church teaching against the baptism of polygamists. The Africans said the traditional stand cruelly forced converts to abandon their plural wives. Now converts in polygamous societies will be allowed to keep their wives if they forswear further marriages...
...with the modifier hopefully. If you do, forget it; the battle is lost. On the other hand, if you still insist that infer and imply mean two different things, hang tough, despite accusations of being a word prig; this is one the word prigs could win. As for the plural-singular identity crises suffered by words like data and media, stand by; they could go either...
Data and media were plurals pure and simple in RHD-I; the new edition advises that data can be either singular or plural, and media as a singular has become common in, of all places, the media. Another favorite media word, kudos, has undergone an even more perplexing transformation. Originally a singular meaning praise or glory, it has been misconstrued so often as a plural that, by a process lexicographers call back-formation, it has spawned a synthetic singular. Sure enough, here it is with its own entry in RHD-II: kudo. What next? Will a single instance of pathos...