Jose Carillo's Forum

LANGUAGE HUMOR AT ITS FINEST

Making yourself more proficient in English need not be a drag. You can actually speed up the learning process and make it fun by generously lacing it with humor—but preferably the best that the English language can offer.

In this new section, apart from giving a fixed slot to our weekly “In a Lighter Vein” pop-out humor piece in the Forum homepage, we have put together the finest of those weekly humor pop-ups since the Forum started. The best of them—collected from various sources on the web and sent in by friends—are all here, posted in the Forum under the following headings: Wordplay, On the Job, Student and School Life, and Miscellany.

So if you missed any of the best of the Forum’s weekly humor pop-ups, you can enjoy and savor them again and again here—and better still, share them with your friends!

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Singular Singulars and Peculiar Plurals
Author unknown

How singular some old words are!
I know two with no singular.
Agenda and marginalia: Both
Are always plural, ’pon my oath.
The opposite’s the case to greet us
With propaganda and coitus,
Upon these never sets the sun,
And yet of each there’s only one.
Phantasmagoria, likewise,
Pervades, yet never multiplies.
Strata pluralises stratum,
Ultimata and ultimatum.
Memoranda and memorandum
Candelabra and candelabrum.
Why are nostrums then not nostra?
Why speak I not then from rostra?
Thus my datum grows to data,
My erratum to errata.
Child, put this on your next agendum.
Pudenda’s more than are pudendum
Medium makes media.
Criterion, criteria.
What’s plural for hysteria?

(Author Unknown)

From the English for Students website

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