Hummuses

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Cole calling from Thousand Oaks, California.

Hi, Cole. How are you doing?

Very well. How are you guys?

Good enough. Good enough.

I had a question. I work at a restaurant as a server. We have hummus on the menu.

And sometimes people order more than one plate of hummus, but I don’t know what the plural of hummus is.

Is it hummuses, hum-i, hum-in like oxen, or is it just hummus? I just had no idea.

Oh, my.

So they’re ordering one of the spicy hummus and one of the plain hummus, maybe, so that two plates are coming to the table.

Well, it’s called the hummus trio because there’s three kinds of hummus.

Oh, I see.

But if they order more than one order, do I say hummuses or do I still just say hummus?

Oh.

What do you say just automatically?

What first comes to your mouth?

Yeah.

Half the time I bring up I don’t know what the plural hummus is, and the other half of the time I just call it hummus.

And people just say it’s hummus.

Like, oh, that must be the plural of hummus.

It’s just hummus.

So I wasn’t sure if there is an actual plural word for hummus.

Okay.

You could say hummuses.

English will permit it.

It is morphologically correct, though it sounds awkward, because hummus, like some other words, is an amorphous mass noun.

So dirt, mud, muck, swill.

I actually like hummus.

Those are just other.

I was going to say.

But all of these words share with hummus this fact that to make them plural sounds weird.

I have lots of dirts in my yard.

It doesn’t work, you know?

Why are you feeding me these swills?

It doesn’t really work.

So what you would say is kinds of dirt, kinds of swill, kinds of muck, kinds of hummus, or plates of hummus, or servings of hummus.

I’ve got two servings of hummus coming up.

I think I would say hummuses.

I think I’ve seen that in English.

English will permit it, but the native speaker’s ear kind of, it clangs a little bit in the ear.

Yeah, it sounds funny.

It’s kind of like Priuses.

Is it Prii Prius?

Oh, there you go.

That’s Prius’s.

Yeah.

That’s Prius’s for sure.

Or hippopotamus.

Because hummus is not a Latin word, so we would not do a Latin plural on it.

So that’s why I wouldn’t do…

Good point.

Yeah.

It’s from Arabic and Turkish.

Yeah, Arabic and Turkish.

That would make sense.

I’m really glad you asked this question, actually, and I’m trying to think back.

I went to a particular potluck dinner where we didn’t decide in advance who was going to bring what, and there were so many plates of hummus, and I’m trying to think what we said.

I mean, it’s like, why did everybody bring hummus?

Hummusplosion.

Hum-apocalypse.

Hum-apocalypse.

It was.

I can’t remember what I said.

But you’re right.

There’s nothing really instinctive there.

I guess I said, what are all these hummuses doing here?

In this classic case of a foreign bar, and we find this again and again, either we borrow them incorrectly, like with a panini, where we treat it as a singular even though it’s a plural.

Right.

Biscotti.

Biscotti, exactly.

Or we borrow them with a malformed pronunciation.

We do this repeatedly to French.

Sorry, French people.

And or we decide to throw on an English suffix that doesn’t really work with the foreign root, the Turkish or Arabic root.

Yeah.

So, Cole, did we help you?

What are you going to do?

Yes, you did.

I guess I’ll just say there’s two plates of hummus coming.

That works.

Yeah, two plates.

It’s a little more awkward.

You can say hummuses, too, but just save yourself the conversation of like, all right, I called this radio show and they said I could say hummuses.

And some people would think it’s weird.

And so you’re one of those people who think it’s weird.

Sorry.

But if you do that, mention the show by name, A Way with Words, okay?

Thanks, Cole.

You got it.

Take care.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye.

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