Faxen
Comments: 15
The thought occurs to me, as such thoughts often do at this time of night, that the plural of fax should be faxen. Why is it faxes? This seems like the easy way out.
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Posted to General Rants • 2003.11.07 (Fri) • 01:16
Comments
Posted by milov 2003.11.07, 02:23
Well, I’m sorta glad it isn’t because ‘faxen’ already is a word in Dutch: the present tense plural conjugation for “to fax”. Could be confusing. :)
Posted by Carey Henderson 2003.11.07, 03:26
Yeah, and what about moose? Moose? That’s it? Frickin’ MOOSE for cryin’ out loud? Oughtta be Meece. Maybe Moosen.
I saw a flock of moosen! There were many of them! Many, much moosen! In the woods The woodes! The woodzes!
The meece want the food! Food is to eatenizit! The Meece want the fooding in the woodinizit!
Posted by patrick h. lauke 2003.11.07, 05:02
why should it be faxen ? isn’t the plural of facsimile facsimiles, and therefore faxes ?
Posted by Ryan 2003.11.07, 06:04
Carey — I, too, immediately thought of the Brian Regan sketch when I read the subject of this entry. :)
Posted by Kristen 2003.11.07, 08:26
wax-waxes. (but there is waxen) tax-taxes. Vax-Vaxen!
Posted by nick 2003.11.07, 09:03
I don’t know about fax and faxen, but the plurals of box and fox, for example, should be boxen and foxen. Not necessarily respectively, because English needs to make even less sense in my opinion.
Posted by Eric 2003.11.07, 09:13
That was definitely from a Brian Regan routine.
Posted by pixelkitty 2003.11.07, 09:35
fax is slang - so pluralise as is your wont.
the english language is such a bastardisation of every other language that it really isn’t worth trying to understand why we have rules, exceptions to rules and entire constructions that disobey every rule in our own book.
take bow for instance.
gah.
Posted by jh 2003.11.07, 09:44
I don’t know this Brian Regan fellow, but I have a feeling I’d like to meet him.
Posted by patrick h. lauke 2003.11.07, 10:56
i don’t pretend to even understand a fraction of it, but this PDF has an interesting tidbit
“The plural in sheep and oxen is lexically conditioned, because it is determined by the individual words and cannot be predicted from other principles (cf. foxes/ foxen, two beeps/beep).
1 In linguistics, an asterisk (the sign *) indicates that an expression is ‘unacceptable’ or ‘ungrammatical’, i.e. issomething which no native speaker would say or write.”
Posted by dowingba 2003.11.07, 14:20
Kristen has it spot on. Faxes should be the plural and Faxen should be the adjective.
Posted by dowingba 2003.11.07, 14:21
ie: Those emails are so bland and to the point they’re almost faxen in nature.
Posted by mboszko 2003.11.08, 17:19
…and the plural of Red Sox should be Soxen.
Posted by Yet 2003.11.12, 02:24
English is kind of messed up. Take the ‘I before E’ rule:
‘I’ before ‘e’ except after ‘c’ and when sounding like ‘a’ like ‘neigbor’ and ‘weigh’ and on weekends and holidays and all throughout May and you’ll always be wrong no matter what you say.
…that’s a hard rule…
Posted by Dave 2005.12.09, 03:35
I don’t know if faxen should be the adjective. Faxish might make more sense.
“Send you a paper copy? That’s so faxish!”
I think faxen is the verb form.
“Do you see it yet? I’m faxen it to you right now.”
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