Mottainai or The Language Discussions

The company’s official stance is that it is Lego (or LEGO) and never Legos. So it should be a Lego set built out of Lego bricks/plates/pieces/whatever. I don’t care either way (US - native English speaker if we think that matters). Both Legos or Lego pieces are fine with me.

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To make things extra confusing for my kids, I switch back and forth without realizing it.

But, yeah, I’m with Lego. They are “Lego brand toy building bricks”. So “bricks” if you like, otherwise we’re in unofficial territory.

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When speaking of the company or brand, it’s LEGO. When speaking of the pieces in a plural form, it’s LEGOs. I know this goes against the company’s stance, but they are wrong. Just as the creator of the .gif file format is incorrect in his pronunciation of “jiff”. It’s a hard “g” pal, live with it.

If you need multiple bandages, you say, “Get the Band-Aids,” not “get the Band-Aid brand adhesive bandages.” Same thing here.

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I seriously cringe if I hear someone say “sushis” or “kimonos”, but I have learned to ignore the sensation if someone says “ninjas”. If you say those are English words now, the pluralization is just something that some people will do, and they aren’t wrong. (even though they are, really)

I fortunately haven’t been exposed to people saying Legos enough for that to reach the point that ninjas has, but my cringe reflex may well get weaker over time if I hear or read it often enough. Not wrong, just jarringly different.

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“Hey, can you pass that Lego.”

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I would never say sushis.
But I would definitely say kimonos.

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Ah, but that sounds wrong because it is wrong. That lego castle has 1520 pieces. Some might say ‘bricks,’ but I’ve always just said pieces.

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I suspect how it gets integrated into English comes down to whether or not there’s an obvious commonly used counting term:

Pieces/plates of sushi
Pieces/bricks of Lego

vs.

Kimonos
Ninjas

Of course, some people just pluralize everything.

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At least in the gaming (and bad film) circles I move in, knowledge that “ninjas” is an incorrect Japanese formation is common enough that I’ve seen it deliberately used to imply “the Western misunderstood version of ninja”.

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It may be an incorrect Japanese formation, but I’m far from sure that necessarily makes it an incorrect English one (although of course ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ in language can be somewhat nebulous concepts anyway). I would expect ‘ninjas’ to be the usual English formation - although I have no idea whether the data supports that expectation!

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Indeed - once the word has been imported into the language, it is usual to then apply your own rules to it.

It is like people objecting to panini being singular “You know that should be panino, right?”

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English is a bit of a hodge podge of plural “rules” anyway:

Mouse :arrow_forward: mice
House :arrow_forward: houses
Goose :arrow_forward: geese
Moose :arrow_forward: moose
Octopus :arrow_forward: ???

(I’ve heard arguments for octopi, octopuses, and octopodes)

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“Vinyls” is one I hear (or read) more and more. I just have to pretend it’s a concatenation of “vinyl records”

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Just listened to Tom Waits describe it as Legos. So that’s the bottom line then.

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Technically it should be octopodes as it was created from Greek but in English, Octopuses is fine. Octopi comes from mistakenly believing it is a Latin word, when it is just a latinised word (i.e. the original K was changed for C).

But then ancient Greeks and Romans called them polypous and polypus respectively anyway, so its all nonsense.

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It’s funny how languages work. In Spanish you say pass me those Lego. But you would never call the individual pieces Lego. They are pieces, bricks… I have never heard the individual pieces called “Legos” in Britain or here in NZ.

Regarding sushi/kimono. I can see how in English other imported plural words (panini, spaghetti) end in “i”, hence sushi does not get an s as a similar assimilation, but kimono/ninja ends in a vowel that rarely stays plural without a particle behind.

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How about samurai? Tsunami? (to pick the first two examples that came to mind, I’m sure there are more)

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It’s the Seven Samurai, isn’t it? I don’t remember having heard samurai pluralized with an s as often as ninja. Although we do in Spanish, funny that (but we also put an s behind spaghetti, we respect Latin/Italian way less than English does)

Tsunami… I must admit I have never heard (or I don’t recall) talking or hearing mentioned about more than one… Which is enough to ruin your day, to be honest.

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“It’s apocalyptes, dammit!” [eaten by locusts]

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When I first heard ‘legos’ I assumed it referred to multiple sets. That still sounded strange to my English ears, but it appears to mean the pieces, which somehow sounds even stranger to them.

I love this stuff. Language is great.

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