Awaiting your turn in the dentist’s chair, you might start thumbing a Pleistocene copy of Arizona Highways. It’s either that or Dentistry Today, and you figure that before an hour’s up, you’ll know more than you necessarily want to about the dental arts in general and your personal oral apparatus in particular. Anyway, Arizona Highways is a fine publication full of pretty words, informative pictures and colorful advertorials plugging everything from authentic Southwestern art you can’t afford to posh Sonoran resorts you can’t afford. You’ve just finished drinking in the delicious details of a sumptuous Lake Havasu dinner cruise you can’t afford, when your eye lights upon this irresistible header:
“Cacti or Cactuses—readers find the proper plural a thorny question.”
“As a plural for cactus, the word “cacti” is to be shunned… ”
As your luck would have it, that’s a topic falling squarely within the “general knowledge” category—stickery succulents, that is—not grammar. Cactus is common in Colorado, and our neighbors to the south are practically besieged by it. If you’ve ever gone off-road in the Southwest you are intimately—and probably painfully—familiar with that region’s most fearsome flora, and it is by virtue of that hard-won acquaintance that you have earned a definitive answer to that divisive question.
They’re both wrong.
With all due respect to the Romans, for whom modern linguists harbor a deep and reverent affection, their language isn’t just dead, it’s petrified. And even Latin’s most ardent admirers must admit that the needlessly abrupt “-i” as a plural suffix form for words ending in “-us” is, in this age, inconsistently applied at best, and is at worst timorous and unreliable.
The accepted plural of octopus, for example, is generally accepted to be octopi, and if an abacus were used to count itself twice, it would be abaci. On the other hand, colleges and universities have no compunction about maintaining multiple campuses, and no person of serious mind has ever described a convocation of unfairly demeaned anatomical orifices as a clutch of ani.
Perhaps worse, “cacti” carries the subtle stink of affectation, a two-bit shine on a 10-cent word that persons of unlikely intellectual ambitions trot out because they think it makes them sound scholarly. As a plural for cactus, the word “cacti” is to be shunned, as are all who use it.
“ …it would be fair to wonder what acceptable alternative exists.”
Turning to “cactuses,” we can agree that the “-es” plural suffix is easy, unambiguous, and holds a long and honorable record of service. It’s comfortable, predictable, versatile. A short and retiring supplement, it wields a potent grammatical authority that complete words of far greater definition and prestige can only dream of. It’s just no good for cactus.
In that case, “-es” takes the starch out of the very word it means to exalt. It sucks all of the smart, staccato vigor out of the hard Cs, dulls the T’s sharp confidence, and sends an otherwise distinctive term sliding down into a hissing swamp of weedy sibilance. Aesthetically, “cactuses” does not well become the mouth. Taxonomically, it’s a grave affront to some of proud Nature’s most durable, and most dangerous, herbaceous creations. It’s a blameless suffix forced to evil purpose by the ignorant, and people of good conscience will avoid cactuses in both written and spoken discourse.
Having now seen the two widely accepted plural forms of “cactus” utterly and irrevocably discredited, it would be fair to wonder what acceptable alternative exists. Only this:
The only legitimate plural of cactus is…cactus.
How simple, and yet how sublime. And don’t look so shocked. It works for moose, and for fish, and for pants. Why not cactus? Go ahead—try it on for size.
“Thank you for the generous gift of this single-potted cactus.”
“Thank you for the generous gift of these two potted cactus.”
“Ouch! I pricked my finger on this solitary prickly pear cactus.”
“Hello, 911 dispatch? I have fallen face-first into an unspecified number of prickly pear cactus.”
See? There is no discomfort associated with this flexible usage, nor unpleasant aftertaste. Fact is, lots of conscientious and functionally literate persons have been doubling-down on the plural cactus for years without social stigma or legal complication. And, if this inspired expedient occasionally meets with resistance from the simple and the puritanical, right-thinking folk need be neither shamed nor compelled to unsuitable suffixation. They are grateful to be at last free of the self-doubt and grammatical uncertainty that formerly plagued cactus-related disquisition.
And you’re welcome, too.
