to wince every time I see "fora"?

[Mardymwahhaha]

The word forum has become naturalised as an English word surely? Can't people just say forums and stop showing off that they know using the Latin.

This is one that gets me a bit confused (doesn't take much)

speak
speech

et al (used by anyone whom has opened a psychology book it seems)

Testes and penes: therefore testicle and penicle?

lol at "penicle"

Agenda is an interesting one. It's a latin gerundive (I think) meaning "things worthy of being done".

In which case surely it's better and more succinct to say "let's move on to the next agendum" instead of "let's move onto the next item on the agenda".

Changing the language, I once read of a notice board in Oxford that pluralised "charabanc" to "charsabanc".

Penes, yes. But then just to be confusing it's phalloi.

Yes indeed. However:

clitoris - clitorides

mumsamilitant - your post is in itself mildly confusing. You say this "one" gets you confused (speak, speech, yes, understandable) and then add "et al" and your parenthetic comment - is "et al" a separate thing that confuses you? [hconfused] Or is it the rest of the grammatical parts of the verb "to speak" that continues to confuse?

Yeah, really yanbu - encyclopaediae?? Seriosuly? How wanky is that? I think most people these days use encyclopaedias and formulas. As for flora/ae/as - why not just fucking flowers, fgs? vegetation? forest? Tell them to get that fucking log out of their arse.

ooh, and DD and I looked up the penis one - apparently 'tis 'penises'?

But definitely not 'penii'! :o

Sorry - I use formulae lots, doing an OU degree in Maths, you see it ALL the time..

Formulae is fine in that context ByTheWay - likewise in programming. But have a look at that link I posted upthread. It just seems wrong

'penises' is okay - because, like some of the other words discussed here, it has become so widely used it is now accepted. A dictionary will probably give both options (The first one I could lay my hands on in my house just now was a Collins, and that does)

I just tried a Google to see what you get (Googled 'plural of penis') and the majority of the links, on the first page or two anyway, still give 'penes'

Depends how anal I am you are :)

Lexus & Lexi courtesy of