Friday December 9, 2005
Two Italian and one Japanese
By FADZILAH AMIN
IS a sentence like this correct: Two Italian and one Japanese drivers will be competing in the motor race.
Should it be “drivers” or “driver”? – Reader
It should be “drivers” because it’s an “and”, not an “or” construction, and there are three drivers in all. However, the sentence sounds awkward. It could be restructured in the following way:
“One Japanese driver and two Italian ones will be competing in the motor race.”
Chairmen of faculty boards
WITH reference to your explanation of Nov 25, I’d like to ask: If the plural for “head of state” is “heads of state”, why is it “chairmen of faculty boards” (not “board”)? – LHY
It does not seem logical that the plural of “head of state” is not “heads of states” but “heads of state”, as if all the heads rule over one state. But that is the plural form most commonly used for “head of state” and that some dictionaries record (e.g. Concise Oxford, Oxford Advanced Learner’s). The plural may be in that form because the whole phrase is a title and the plural form has been sanctioned by usage, not logic.
“Chairmen of faculty boards” seems perfectly logical to me. Each chairman chairs a different faculty board, and so the chairmen are referred to in the plural as “chairmen of faculty boards”. Nobody ever says “chairmen of faculty board”: I tried finding the phrase on the Internet and drew a blank, but there were many sites with “chairmen of faculty boards”.
If English was a perfectly logical language, it would be spelt phonetically and there won’t be irregular verbs or irregular plural nouns. But languages are man-made and human beings are not perfectly logical creatures!
Trains do terminate
I WAS on board the KLIA Express recently and I couldn’t help noticing and wondering about a word used in their announcement.
At the end of the journey, when passengers were about to disembark, there was an announcement which sounded something like this:
“All passengers are requested to remove their belongings as the train has terminated.”
Is that word technically correct? How could a train terminate? In layman’s terms, “terminate” means finish or end.
Could you clarify? – Penangite
I answered a very similar question to yours a few months ago regarding the word “terminate” in the announcements of the KLIA Express. Let me reproduce my answer below:
It is correct to say that the KLIA Express or any train terminates at a certain station. This sort of sentence can be heard in all the announcements in London Underground trains, e.g. “This train terminates at Walthamstow”, meaning that Walthamstow is the terminus of that particular train.
When a train or bus “terminates” at a certain station, it means that it ends its journey there.
The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary (2005), in its second definition of “terminate”, says: “(of a bus or train) to end a journey/trip” and gives the following example of the use of the word in that sense: “This train terminates at London Victoria.”
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