A grammar question

February 24, 2019 • 8:16 pm

So I was reading a book this evening that mentioned a Canadian hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs. Yes, I know that team, and always thought the name sounded curious, but then I thought, “Why isn’t it Maple Leaves?” After all, the plural of “leaf” is “leaves”.

Now you might say that the word “Leafs” is not a plural, but simply the name of the team. But that doesn’t make sense either, as there is no noun “leafs.” And suppose the team was named after an appropriate waterfowl, the Canada Goose. Would they call the team “The Canada Gooses”? No, they’d call it the “Canada Geese“.

Now I’m sure there’s an explanation for this, and that a Canadian reader will school me. But I’m still puzzled.

This is not right

118 thoughts on “A grammar question”

      1. It is poetic. It is calling to their individuality as players, whilst they are obviously a team. It redounds to the fans, individuals, all, but united in their support,

    2. No, it has to do with how language is structured. I remember I read about this in one of Pinker’s books, but I cannot remember the details now.

  2. You could consider “Toronto Maple Leaf” a proper noun, as with the Nissan Leaf, where you might find two Leafs in the parking lot.

    Some writers have used leafs in odd plural situations, such as leafs of kale. (https://www.dictionary.com/browse/leafs)

    But I strongly suspect that this professional entertainment organization was more interested in marketing than grammar, and didn’t want the obvious jokes about when the Toronto Maple leaves.

    2. As you note, it’s become a proper noun. As such, I think it does not necessarily follow the same (irregular) rule of pluralisation as the word it derives from; instead, in this case it just adds an ‘s’ in the normal way.

      As someone noted below, ‘Mickey Mouses’ is analogous.

      cr

    3. I think it’s poetic license that coincidentally in this case acts as if it’s a certain type of proper noun. If sports teams names acted consistently as as proper nouns like you say, then two guys from that Boston Baseball team would be Red Soxes, and they aren’t.

      Similarly with AFG’s example of Bob Leaf. I might go to Bob Leaf’s house and refer to him and is wife as the Leafs, but I go to the Red Sox dugout, not the Red Sox’s dugout. Likewise if two of the players had me over for a bbq, I’d go to the Red Sox bbq, not the Red Soxes bbq.

      Soooo….I’m thinking it’s better just to call Maple Leafs an irregular grammar choice and leaf it at that. 🙂 Beware of seeking patterns that aren’t there…

  4. Suppose you had a friend named Bob Leaf and you are going to visit him and his family. Are you going to the home of the “Leafs” or the “Leaves”?

      2. +1 grasshopper!
        On a similar note, I find it strange how Montreal Canadiens is pronounced, sort of half English half French. Sort of the way you’d pronounce Canadian in English, but ending -enne.

        1. It isn’t pronounced “-enne” (in either language), actually. But the idea is the same as the parent topic – namely that “Le club de hockey canadien” is a proper noun and in this case doesn’t translate, exactly.

        1. Do figs drop their leaves in autumn?
          OK – tropical tree, so a bit moot. When you grow one in temperate zones.

  5. I’m at work, so I don’t have access to my bookshelf, but didn’t Steven Pinker discuss this in The Language Instinct?

    IIRC, it has something to do with the fact that because we don’t recognise a hockey team as a collection of leaves, our brain just invokes the “add an ‘s’ to a plural” rule.

    I might be misremembering it, though. It’s been a long time since I read the book.

    1. In Words and Rules I think

      “This phenomenon isn’t unusual in English, as Pinker observed in “Words and Rules.” A baseball player may fly out, but an announcer says the player “flied out,” not “flew out.” You have one “silly goose” and multiple “silly gooses.” When the Walkman debuted, stores advertised that they sold “Walkmans.” And get two people in Mickey Mouse costumes together, and you have Mickey Mouses, not Mickey Mice.”

      https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2006-02-15-0602150192-story.html

      1. I think in that case, ‘still life’ is effectively one word, meaning a style of painting. Therefore it does not necessarily follow the same rule for pluraling as if ‘still’ was the adjective and ‘lives’ was the noun.

        cr

        1. In fact, I think ‘still life’ is a contraction of ‘still life painting’, therefore the plural is a contraction of ‘still life paintings’.

          In the same way ‘automatic’ is short for ‘automatic pistol’, so you can refer to ‘automatics’ (plural) which makes no sense otherwise as it’s an adjective and I don’t think adjectives take plural forms?

          cr

          2. OK, but same argument applies.

            “I wanted a manual but all their rentals are automatics” – it is understood that ‘manual’ and ‘automatic’ – which are actually adjectives – are in fact standing in for the nouns ‘manual car’ and ‘automatic car’. (And so is ‘rental’, come to think of it).

            cr

  6. I was told they were named after the Maple Leaf regiment. Each member was a Maple Leaf – a proper noun – so correct plural is Leafs not Leaves… Google seems to back that up but my grammar-Fu is poor!

  7. I suspect this is one of those “depends on who you ask” kind of things. I grew up watching the Leafs and I’m not even sure. My understanding is one of the early owners, Conn Smythe, renamed the team after his WWI unit, the Maple Leaf Regiment, the members of which were called “Leafs”. But I’m sure Leafs fans feel the franchise was bestowed from on high by the Almighty, so such questions are lost to the ages.

  8. Pinker has a section on this in The Language Instinct where he mentions this very example. The reason for the odd plural is that names are conjugated as regular nouns, regardless of whether the words making up the name are ordinarily irregular. For example, the plural of walkman is walkmans, not walkmen. Maple Leafs (writes Pinker) is a pluralization of the name Maple Leaf, Canada’s national symbol. Hence, the plural is Maple Leafs, not Maple Leaves. This is common to all variants of English, and not specifically a Canadian thing.

    1. Oh, bingo! That’s what I was groping towards in my comments above.

      I haven’t read Pinker’s book but it sounds like an interesting read. I must try it.

      cr

  9. An expert says this:

    “It follows the simple rule that nouns used as proper nouns take regular (productive) plurals even if their common noun counterparts have irregular plurals”

    That verbiage [foliage?] is unpacked at the WaPo HERE

        1. OMG, for the first time ever, I have to disagree with PCC: sorry–it’s RIGHT because it SOUNDS RIGHT. It’s the Leafs, as in, “Go, Leafs, go!” However, because PCC is not a Leafs fan (sorry again that you’re not part of Leafs Nation) he may feel better with the team’s affectionate nickname: The Buds.
          BTW, it’s true that Conn Smythe did name the team after the Maple Leafs.

          1. The difference has to do with one being a common noun (leaf, referring to the foliage) and the other being a proper noun (the team name – one player would a “LEAF” and a group of players skating out onto the ice “LEAFS”). In English, at least, the common and the proper nouns follow different rules when making plurals. This is Pinker’s explanation. He’s right because this phenomenon is very consistent, for example when the five sons and daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Child come walking past, we call them the “CHILDS”.

      2. Canada Goose is the brand name of outerwear made in Canada. If you saw a bunch of Canada Goose clothing, would you say “Look at all those Canada Geese” or “Look at all those Canada Gooses”?

      4. To riff on Afg’s post above, when talking about my friends Alice and Bob Goose (and their children Pat and Sandy Goose), we refer to the Gooses, not the Geese.

    1. You mean Celtics? It really should be Celts, I think. Celtic is the adjective. The Celts were an early European people. Come to think of it they were very short people, so it’s unclear why they would be recruited to play in the NBA.

      2. Gee, thought I put in a name…
        Asking about why the team is pronounced with soft “C”, while generally the term is used with hard “C”.

      3. CR is asking about the pronunciation being “Seltik” rather than “Keltik”

        There’s a well known Scot’s football team called The Celtic FC or simply Celtic – pronounced Seltik

          1. I am not sure since Celtic Glasgow was traditionally the city’s catholic team, founded by Irish immigrants.

      1. I grew up in edinburgh and it definitively and forever is ‘seltic’.(catholic from Glasgow) We also had the Hearts- the heart of midlothian (a protestant soccer team).
        There are two varieties of Celtic languages in Britain if not more-p and q. And the Celts are more cultural than than any particular ethnic type. Long journey from the Caucasus -many stops along the way-some coming thru Spain and up the West Coast and some coming from across Europe. Hence the odd propensity in the Irish to have dark hair, blue eyes, pale skin and hooked noses. All mixed in with a little Norse from later centuries

  13. Guess is merely that the original official team name was something like The Toronto Maple Leaf Hockey Club and when fans talked about them they just shortened it to Leafs. And that we’re a weird country with sports teams. We used to have two football teams in the same league both with the nickname Roughriders.

  14. First, the history.

    ‘Leaves’ comes from the strong masculine declension in Anglo-Saxon (Old English. For instance, cnif, cnifas (modern English knife, knives – there was no ‘k’ in AS/OE)- an ‘f’ in the middle of a word was voiced in AS/OE, so it sounded ‘v’. Our modern letter -f- represents a voiceless labial-dental fricative whereas -v- represents a voiced labial-dental fricative. But, of course we still pronounce ‘f’ in two different ways – as I have done in this sentence (‘of’ and ‘different’).

    Now, history has left us with a confusing situation in which the unvoiced f’ is always ‘f’, but the voiced is spelt either ‘f’ or ‘v’. Some words, such as hoofs/hooves can be spelt either way. (Note: in The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien used ‘dwarves’, while including a note that ‘dwarves’ is wrong in normal usage – it should be dwarfs.)

    So it’s all rather arbitrary.

    As to the main question, I think the answer is that the team’s name is an entity in itself, and that the -s is nothing more than an idiom used to assert the collective (and plural) nature of a single team. To alter Leaf to Leaves would be to alter the name of the team (and, perhaps, to imply that each member was a Canadian Maple Leaf).

  15. I am not an expert–but there is cartoon precedence for very strange plurals from when I was a kid— From the old cartoon
    PIXIE AND DIXIE
    AND MR JINKS THE ORANGE CAT WHO clearly stated “I hate meeces to pieces” I wonder what he would have said if he only dis-liked one meece?

      1. Oxford Dictionaries says:

        Is the plural of mouse in the computing sense mice or mouses? People often feel that this sense needs its own distinctive plural, but in fact the ordinary plural mice is commoner, and the first recorded use of the term in the plural (1984) is mice.

        /@

  17. This is sort of a waste of time. Who cares?
    Oh… did you know the proper pronunciation of the word/ team Celtics is with a hard “C” ( as in cow, not cent)?
    I repeat…who cares?

    3. Who cares? The millions of fans of the greatest team in the long history of the known universe! That’s who!
      Especially those of us who watched a certain game in 1967.

      1. ….. some of us were in Nathan Philips Square in April 67 and saw George Armstrong hoist the cup in front of an adoring crowd, with Bower, Kelly, Shack, Keon, Maholavich et al ….. finest moment in sports history!

    4. Thank you for your comment, Mr. Davis, which of course is completely superfluous as well as rude. And I no longer care about whether you comment on this site.

      I notice you’ve made rude “I don’t care” comments like this before. Apparently you care enough to tell us that, and clearly enough readers care to join in the discussion.

      Bye!

  21. Good point. When I taught programming I sometimes had to yell at the kids to stop fooling with the mouses, or worse, the mouse balls.

  22. If you think that’s weird, I remember the first time I asked someone why they always refer to the Montreal Canadiens as (wait for it…) The Habs. That’s right, they don’t call them anything close to what the team name is.

    Why? because Habs is short for ‘habitants'(in English, that would be ‘inhabitants’, or ‘residents’.

    #stuffyouhavetolearntobeCanadian

      1. Don’t worry. I am still trying to figure out why, if the plural of goose is geese then why is the plural of moose not meese? English is a funny language.

        1. When I was a kid, I asked my father What the plural of “mongoose” was: do you say “mongooses” or “mongeese”?” He said “You say ‘There’s a mongoose. There’s another one.'”

      1. I, for one, am beginning to forget events two months ago let alone two years ago. So, nothing is lost, really, in reviewing issues. It’s all brand new to me. At some point many of us will relive the past 5 minutes as if it had never happened. 😎

        1. I remember once Jerry posted something he had posted before and I made the exact same stupid joke as I had on the original post. We are probably all stuck on ground hog day but don’t remember.

  24. If you had two Leaf Eriksons you wouldn’t say you had two Leaves, you would say you had two Leafs.

      1. Only if they are two or more sets of Leaf Eriksons. If you had two Leaf Eriksons in one jar, and two Leaf Eriksons in another jar, you would have two Leafs Eriksons.

  25. There is actually a shirt you can buy listing why Vancouver is the best place to live in Canada. One of the items comments on Vancouver’s hockey team not being that great, but “…at least we can spell Toronto Maple LEAVES”

    1. OK how DO we address a team – as a collection of individuals or as a collective unit?
      Do we say “Liverpool [collective] has a chance to win” or “Liverpool [individuals] have a chance to win”? English is uncomfortable with both.

      I would say “Toronto Maple Leafs” exhibits ellipsis – “Toronto Maple Leaf’s [team]”… Ultimately you cannot rationalise it as English is still accommodating its loss of inflection.

      1. Your question about Liverpool is actually variable – in American and usually (but not always) Canadian English, it is one way; in British English the other.

  27. I’m late to this discussion but I will put in that I’m glad for the distinction. I have a couple of Acer rubrum (pl.?) in my front yard and every fall I’m happy to see all those bright maple leaves. I’d feel differently if I had to put up with a bunch of Maple Leafs filling up my yard.

  29. If you listen to Joni Mitchell’s Raised on Robbery, she sure seems to say that. (A little money riding on the Maple Leaves/ Along comes a lady in lacy sleeves)

  30. When the Chicago Blackkettle come to town, they will play against the ‘Leaves. Until then, it is The Leafs.

    Either way: Habs! Habs! Habs! Habs! Habs!

    Also: Bruins in ruins!

  31. With apologies to the over-sensitive, there is a verb ‘to goose’. As such, it devolves into a noun ‘goose’. And so, if some jerk actually twice gives you a ‘whack up the nuts’ (you’re male in this scenario, and to confuse things a bit maybe this happens while playing in the NHL but without a jock), surely you do not say you were the recipient of two geese (so it should be a 4-minute penalty). Thus the analogy is maybe imperfect in that sense. Or at least, I could not resist the temptation to thuswise remark.

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