Thursday, July 29, 2010

what's the singular of 'feces'?

The Economist's language blog take a crack at an answer (pun quite intended).

2 comments:

zmjezhd said...

As somebody points out in the commentary, the singular (nominative) form of fæces is fæx. The interesting thing is that it did not mean shit in Latin, but most a euphemism for it in Medical (Medieval) Latin. The two most common words for the substance under discussion in Classical Latin are stercus and merda.

Chris said...

zmjezhd, thanks for the additional info. My Latin is, ahem, non-existent.

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