Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
Think about Loose Coupling
 
PerlMonks  

Re: The plural of "athlete's foot" is...

by Mr_Person (Hermit)
on May 02, 2003 at 17:14 UTC ( [id://255090]=note: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??


in reply to The plural of "athlete's foot" is...

I think it depends on what you mean by the plural. Is it more than one foot? In that case it would be athlete's feet. Or do you mean more than one athlete with an affected foot? That would be athletes' foot. Or even multiple athletes with multiple affected feet, which would be athletes' feet.
  • Comment on Re: The plural of "athlete's foot" is...

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: The plural of "athlete's foot" is... (fishes)
by tye (Sage) on May 02, 2003 at 19:37 UTC

    Good point. However, the term "athlete's foot" is normally assumed to refer to a disease, not to a foot aflicted by it (IMHO). So the plural would likely be used to refer to more than one type of that disease (like how you say "one fish" and "two fish" but to talk about lots of types of coral fish you say "coral fishes").

                    - tye
      more than one type i would guess would be something like: "he had various different athlete's foot infections" where "athlete's foot" would be an adjective describing the type of infection(s).

      As for more than one foot being infected i still think it would be "athlete's foot", (e.g. "he has athlete's foot on both his feet")

      More than one athlete with the infection would still be "athtlete's foot", (e.g., "they all have athletes foot")

      multiple athletes? I would think it would be the same thing, (e.g., "they all have athlete's foot on both their feet", or "all of their feet have athlete's foot infections")

      for multiple different infections on multiple althletes on both their feet, i would guess "they all have various strains of athlete's foot infections one or more of their feet".

      Then again i am not an english teacher (so i could be wrong), but like BronzeWing says here i cannot think of a sentence where you would use anything but "athlete's foot" or "athlete's foot infections". (yeah i spent to much of my day already thinking about this)

      -enlil

        > i cannot think of a sentence where you would use anything
        > but "athlete's foot"

        Athletes' feet are often disgustingly sweaty.
Re: Re: The plural of "athlete's foot" is...
by sauoq (Abbot) on May 09, 2003 at 03:03 UTC
    Or do you mean more than one athlete with an affected foot? That would be athletes' foot.

    Actually, that would probably be "athletes' feet" unless there was only a single infected foot among them... but in that case, it would simply be "athlete's foot" because you couldn't rightly say that the infected foot belonged to more than one athlete...

    Of course, the answer is "athlete's foot" anyway. :-)

    -sauoq
    "My two cents aren't worth a dime.";
    

Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Node Status?
node history
Node Type: note [id://255090]
help
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others lurking in the Monastery: (8)
As of 2024-04-18 11:42 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?

    No recent polls found