OT--Re: Help me find 5 mistakes and than solution to thoes mistakes!

[Taylor, ForrestX]

On Wed, 2004-08-18 at 10:33, Steven W. Orr wrote:
> On Wednesday, Aug 18th 2004 at 10:04 -0700, quoth Taylor, ForrestX:
> 
> =>On Tue, 2004-08-17 at 13:52, Andrew Dietz wrote:
> =>> Ok, here's my biggest pet peeve:
> =>> 
> =>> The plural of CACTUS is CACTUSES, not CACTI, and the plural of
> =>> VIRUS is VIRUSES, not VIRII.
> =>
> =>My pet peeve is the improper spelling of Latin plurals ;o)
> =>
> =>The Latin plural of VIRUS would be VIRI if it had one, certainly not
> =>VIRII.  Virus never had a plural in Latin because it a mass noun, not a
> =>count noun.
> =>
> =>cacti is an acceptable form of plural for cactus (in Latin and English).
> 
> Wrong! The plural of virus is viruses. The word virus can be used as 
> either a mass noun as in "He has a rhyno-virus." which would imply that he 
> has a large number of individual virus particles infesting his body. The 
> alternate is that it is used to refer to individual virus particles at the 
> 20-30nm scale. Since the word is not derived from Latin, there is no 
> possibility of the word ending in the second declension nominative plural 
> "i" suffix to denote plural. The English plural ends in "es" for that 
> reason.

Which part of my statement was wrong?

Actually, I believe that the English word virus did come from Latin. 
Virus was a dangerous or disgusting substance.

Forrest