Computer Mice

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Patty.

Hey, Patty, where are you calling from?

St. Simons Island, Georgia.

Oh, that sounds nice.

Is it really an island?

It really is.

Oh, nice.

What’s on your mind, Patty?

Got a language question?

Yes, well, my question is, I’m a school-based occupational therapist, and not too long ago we were setting up a computer for a child that had special needs.

And we had a small bank of computers, and we’re talking about the different aspects of the computers.

And one of my colleagues, who actually is in a supervisory position, referred to the saying you move with your right hand as mice.

And we were talking about more than one computer mouse.

And I thought she was kidding and looked at her quizzically, and she said, well, it’s more than one mouse, so it’s mice.

And she was dead serious.

I have always referred to the plural of mouse as mouses, like you would do a monitor or a speaker or any other aspect of a computer.

So my question is, what is the plural of a computer mouse?

So you did that.

You say mouse is only for the computer mouse, though, right?

You wouldn’t say it for the mammal.

I guess I think of a computer mouse as a different entity than a living being.

Yeah. These are two coexisting plurals for this.

When the computer mouse became a thing, it was first invented in the 1960s and didn’t really kind of hit public notice and well into the 80s.

The tech community, how can I put this?

These are the kind of people who don’t respect traditions.

And they tend to love to goof around with language like most humans do.

And they’re in a position to do something permanent about it.

You know, put it in their manuals or write a jocular column in, you know, Mac world or PC world or whatever the computer publications were of the era.

And so you will find many people in the tech world using mouses.

And there’s always, to me, a hint of humor or irony or fun about what they’re doing.

You’re not going to find mouses usually in these super dense technical manuals with not a trace of humor.

But, yeah, both have existed.

I worked in IT for a really long time, decades, and I heard both and used both.

Really?

Yeah.

And you think mouses is funnier than mice?

Yeah, I do, actually.

Yeah, mouses.

Well, it’s kind of in the tradition.

I think it’s the other way around.

I don’t know, Patty, I don’t know what you know about the tech world, but there’s a term that they use, for example, where a PC will have a tower, you know, the box part that the keyboard and the monitor plug into.

And so in the tech world, people jokingly pluralize that as boxin’.

You don’t have boxes.

You don’t have like lots of PC boxes.

You have boxin’ to take this kind of old.

Oh, I never heard that.

Yeah, so it’s kind of on the line of children.

Children, oxen.

Yeah, these really old-fashioned plurals that we don’t use anymore, really, except in a few holdovers.

And so it’s just one of the long lines of that.

It’s kind of like the debate over GIF versus GIF.

Like nobody really wants that debate to be settled because it’s kind of fun to argue about it.

And I think technically oriented people are the kind of people who really, really, really love to kind of get jokingly under the skin of other people and are delighted if you’re irritated by mouses.

Oh, I think mousen is funnier than any of those.

What is?

They should have said mousen.

Mousen.

I think that’s funnier than any of those.

That would totally work.

Computer mice sounds like an infestation to me.

Oh.

I don’t know.

What do you think, Patty?

I kind of agree with you, Martha.

I thought it was funny, and I thought it was a joke.

And since then, I’ve asked a number of people, and it seems in my experience, maybe it’s in the southeast, that the IT people I’ve talked to have said mouses.

Oh, really?

-huh.

Yeah, and more of the teacher clinicians have said mice.

Mouses?

Oh, that’s interesting.

So I don’t know.

It kind of goes both ways.

I’ve even had some people say me.

Oh, really?

But then that’s an extension of the funniness, the humor that people try to bring to something otherwise is really boring, right?

True.

True.

A computer.

Well, that’s very interesting.

But there is a, just to get linguistically about it for a second, there is a tradition when a word is borrowed into a very different field to recompose it.

For example, in baseball, when somebody hits a pop fly and it gets caught, they didn’t flew out.

They flied out.

Right?

We don’t use the normal past tense for that.

And there’s a few other places that aren’t worth mentioning here.

But I think this is along the lines of that, where once something moves from field A to field B and they’re very different from each other, people feel fine with just saying, all right, I’m just going to do this differently because I can.

The other thing is that English is weird.

I mean, if you’re a Spanish speaker, then you have it easy because a mouse is a raton and the plural is ratones.

Right.

So, Patty, you’re fine with either one.

I will say looking at analyzing the data, if you get more serious about it for a second, mice is far more common in the computer field than mouses.

Really?

Yeah.

I’m surprised.

Yeah.

Well, Patty, we appreciate the question.

Okay.

Thank you so much for your input.

I appreciate it.

All right.

Call us again sometime with one of these.

All right.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

Take care now.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

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