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A comment on NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students. Parent comment

Re:NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students by wenc on Thursday August 16, 2018 @04:03PM (#17778025)
Unfortunately, common or not, the usage of "alumni" in that context is incorrect. It may be a bit pedantic to insist on correctness in Latin, but all other schools use the term correctly and it doesn't reflect well on a well-regarded school to use the term incorrectly.
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Re:NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students by SahAssar on Thursday August 16, 2018 @06:03PM (#17778791)
Isn't language defined by common use over time?
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Re:NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students by wenc on Thursday August 16, 2018 @09:09PM (#17779612)
Yes it is by processes of consensus arising from appeals to stylistic license, shared community language, memes, etc. But not every grammatical error falls into these categories.

Think of it this way - let's say you make a grammatical mistake that most people consider a mistake. You shouldn't hide behind the "language evolves" catch-all card... you should to recognize it as a mistake and try to use the correct form.

"Alumni" is plural.

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Re:NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students by psychometry on Friday August 17, 2018 @09:38AM (#17782715)
Your first sentence almost led you to a realization that you're wrong, but you just barely missed the boat judging from your last sentence.
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Re:NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students by wenc on Friday August 17, 2018 @10:01AM (#17782870)
Not at all. You have misread me. That language evolves is a common used argument (and there is a place for it) but often used as a catch-all argument to justify errors.
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Re:NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students by SahAssar on Friday August 17, 2018 @05:08PM (#17785585)
But in this case alumni is in common use in that way and has been for some time. You yourself acknowledged that by starting your comment with "Unfortunately, common or not".
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Re:NYU Makes Tuition Free for All Medical Students by wenc on Saturday August 18, 2018 @12:42AM (#17786902)
> But in this case alumni is in common use in that way and has been for some time.

I dispute that. Googling doesn't turn up many examples of official usage of alumni in the singular.

I also disagree with your second claim, which is a projection. When I said "common or not", I meant that frequency in itself does not automatically make something correct, and I gave reasons why in a follow-up comment. I didn't claim that usage was common.

I'm not trying to be difficult, but alumni really is plural. Using alumni as singular is not correct.

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