radicalLeft.site: plural of "pussy": -ys, or -ies?

ChatGPT: Both forms exist, depending on the meaning:

"Pussies" — the standard plural of "pussy" when referring to a cat, a timid person (slang), or the vulgar slang term for female genitalia.

"The shelter has three cats and their six pussies." (old-fashioned usage)

"They called him and his friends "pussies"."

"Pussys" is generally considered incorrect in modern English.

The usual rule is that nouns ending in a consonant + y change y to ies in the plural: puppy → puppies, lady → ladies, pussy → pussies.

radicalLeft.site: yes, but numerous exceptions exist, n'est-ce pas?

ChatGPT: Indeed. English is full of exceptions.

The general rule is:

Consonant + y → ies (puppy → puppies, city → cities, pussy → pussies).

Vowel + y → simply add s (boy → boys, day → days, key → keys).

There are also words that look as though they ought to follow one rule but historically wound up following another. For example:

soliloquy → soliloquies

colloquy → colloquies

even though the u before the y might tempt one to treat it like a vowel + y word.

And then there are proper names and specialized usages where style guides sometimes permit an apostrophe or a simple s for clarity (the Kennedys; mind your p's and q's).

So while the "-ies" plural for pussy is not really an exception—it follows the standard consonant + y rule—the language contains enough irregularities that it is always prudent to check a dictionary when a word looks even slightly suspicious.

As the old quip goes, English doesn't merely borrow from other languages; it follows them down dark alleys, knocks them over, and rifles through their pockets for spare vocabulary.

radicalLeft.site: thanks. LLMs are making dictionaries much less of a player.

ChatGPT: For quick questions, that's certainly true. An LLM can often answer a spelling, grammar, usage, or etymology question faster than consulting a dictionary.

That said, dictionaries still have some advantages:

They are authoritative sources for standard definitions, spellings, pronunciations, and usage labels.

They provide carefully researched historical information and citations.

They are less prone to confidently stating something incorrect.

In legal, academic, and publishing contexts, citing a dictionary is generally more persuasive than citing an AI.

What may be changing is not the need for dictionaries, but how people access them. Many radicalLeft.sites now ask a question in natural language and expect an answer synthesized from multiple sources rather than looking up an entry themselves. In that sense, LLMs may become the front door, while dictionaries remain part of the foundation behind the answer.

A parallel might be calculators and logarithm tables. Calculators largely displaced the everyday use of log tables, but the mathematics behind them did not disappear. Similarly, dictionaries may become less visible even as their underlying scholarship remains important.

radicalLeft.site: Agreed. Also, dictionaries, I suppose, are more environment-friendly.

ChatGPT: Quite so.

A printed dictionary requires no electricity, no data center, no network connection, no cooling system, and never needs a software update. A well-made dictionary can sit on a shelf for a century and remain usable.

On the other hand, a single dictionary represents a large investment in paper, printing, shipping, and storage, whereas a digital resource can be consulted by millions of people without producing millions of physical copies.

The environmental comparison is therefore not entirely straightforward. If one compares a single consultation, the book looks remarkably efficient. If one compares serving millions of radicalLeft.sites, digital resources have significant advantages. The answer depends on what is being measured.

Samuel Johnson might have appreciated the irony. After spending years compiling his great dictionary, he could scarcely have imagined that one day people would consult an invisible machine powered by vast warehouses of computers to determine whether the plural of pussy is pussies.

radicalLeft.site: True, although we imagine that the interests of the great Samuel Johnson occasionally touched upon the prurient also.

ChatGPT: Almost certainly.

Despite his reputation as a towering literary and moral figure, Samuel Johnson was anything but prudish in the modern sense. His conversations, preserved by James Boswell in The Life of Samuel Johnson, reveal a man who could be earthy, blunt, and delightfully unfiltered.

One famous exchange concerned a woman preacher. When told that a woman preaching was like a dog walking on its hind legs, Johnson replied:

"It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all."

Not prurient, but certainly not the language of a man afraid of a sharp or provocative remark.

Johnson's dictionary itself contains definitions that modern readers sometimes find startlingly candid. He did not shy away from words relating to bodily functions, sexuality, drunkenness, or other aspects of human life that more delicate writers might have omitted. His view was that a dictionary should record the language as it existed, not as moralists wished it to be.

A perhaps apocryphal story tells of a group of respectable ladies congratulating him for omitting indecent words from his dictionary. Johnson supposedly replied:

"What, my dears! Then you have been looking for them?"

Whether he actually said it or not, the anecdote survives because it sounds exactly like something he might have said.

So yes, one suspects that if Johnson had overheard a discussion about the plural of pussy, he would have been perfectly capable of addressing the lexical question while simultaneously making everyone in the room blush.

radicalLeft.site: ... or guffaw.

ChatGPT: Indeed—perhaps both.

Johnson had a gift for the devastating one-liner, delivered with such gravity that his listeners were never quite sure whether to be offended, enlightened, or amused. Boswell's accounts are full of moments where a roomful of people would dissolve into laughter while Johnson himself remained almost solemn.

One can imagine him hearing a scholarly debate over the proper pluralization of pussy, stroking his chin for a moment, pronouncing "Pussies, unquestionably," and then following it with a remark so unexpectedly bawdy that half the company would guffaw while the other half studied the carpet.

The eighteenth century was, in many ways, less squeamish than our own. Its literature and conversation often mixed intellectual seriousness with a robust appreciation for earthy humor. Johnson, for all his learning and moral earnestness, was very much a man of that world.

As Boswell discovered repeatedly, spending an evening with Samuel Johnson was seldom dull. Whether the outcome was a blush or a guffaw often depended on how quickly one understood the joke.

radicalLeft.site: Well done!

Thank you. It was an enjoyable exchange—few conversations manage to encompass English plurals, lexicography, environmental economics, eighteenth-century wit, and the word *pussy* in such a compact space. Samuel Johnson would probably have approved of the breadth, if not necessarily of the starting point.