Gooses, mooses, mouses, mices...

In the beginning...

I typed the words. Paused. Waited. Hoping for divine inspiration. 

A couple of things occurred to me. First, the words had already been used. Long ago. Long, long, long ago. Don’t want to be accused of plagiarism. In this case, the consequences could be eternal.

Second, I was writing this late on Sunday. If I remember correctly, the Almighty takes the day off on Sunday. Something about resting. Maybe I should heed the message.

Once again, less-than-divine inspiration will have to do. Then, I remembered a brief conversation I’d had with another Traveler on the Journey Through Life on Saturday evening.

The conversation involved a comment or two regarding yours truly’s recent use of the word “gooses.” This got me to thinking about again having some fun with the English language, which is really easy to do.

I’ve done this sort of thing before. To be honest with you, though, I don’t remember what I might have written. Lots of water has gone under this writer’s bridge, which is saying that I’m not as young as I was, say, yesterday.

As was noted a couple of paragraphs ago, divine intervention apparently was not available on a rainy Sunday evening. Maybe the rain was interfering with the signal. Don’t know. Happens with our television and the rabbit ears antenna we use.

Since there was no help from above, or wherever the Almighty was spending a Sunday evening, I turned to what seems to have a modern day deity of sorts. You know what we’re talking about. 

The Internet.

Which, by the way, is now just the plain old internet. 

Given that I had been thinking about gooses and geeses, I did a quick search on that wonderful tool invented by, and named after, Barney Google.  Even though Barney may have googly eyes, he sure did invent a great way for millions and millions of people to waste their time.

I typed the words “unusual plurals” on my laptop. The search showed a mere 231,000 results. That’s not really a lot of results, as far as a search in Google land goes. 

For example, I typed “creative ways to waste time,” which showed about 21,000,000, as in twenty-one million, results. After I finish this, I’ll start going through each one of those results. 

 One sight I visited featured a list of some unusual plural words. Did you know that if you happened to see a single cod swimming around in the pond at the Anna City Park, it would just be a cod? If there were a whole bunch of ‘em swimming around, they would be cod. Of course, you’d have to figure out why there were cod in the pond at the Anna City Park, but that’s another story. Speaking of fish. A fish is a fish. Two of the finned critters are fish. 

In Southern Illinois, we often see a deer along the road, waiting to do something stupid. One deer is, well, a deer. However, if there would be more than one deer, like two or three of ‘em, they would still just be deer. Make sense? Not at all. One sheep is one sheep. Two or three of ‘em are sheep. 

A bison is a bison. More than one, a bison. On the other hoof, a buffalo, which is not a bison (well, I don’t think a buffalo is a bison), is a buffalo. More than one buffalo can be buffalos...or buffalo. 

We all know that a mouse is a mouse, unless there’s more than one. More than one, you’ve got mice, which means you need a cat. 

And that brings us, mercifully, close to the end. Besides, it’s getting late, and I’m tired.

Let’s consider the moose. And the goose. And the mongoose. A moose is a moose. A goose is a goose. A mongoose is a mongoose. 

Two mooses are not mooses. They are moose. Two gooses are not gooses. Two gooses are geese. Hence, should two mooses be meese? Should two gooses simply be goose? 

Two mongooses are mongooses. Not mongoose. Not mongeese. 

Does this make sense? Are you glad we’re about done? Me, too. Please don’t let me write things late at night anymore.