Pluralses

"Come, hobbitses!"

— Gollum, The Lord of the Rings

Sometimes a characterses will display their lacks of eloquenceses (or lack of familiarity with the English languages) by randomly pluralising wordses that frankly don't needses pluralising (including wordses that are alreadys pluralses). This tends to go with improper verb conjugation too, sometimeses completely nonsensically. E.g., instead of "I am a troper", expect to see "I are a tropers" or "I ams a tropers".

A Subs Tropes of You No Take Candles. Compares Confusings Multiples Negativeses. Not to be confused with loanwordses that have several possible pluralses such that one does not know which one is right (Latin-ish wordses, etc.).

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Exampleses:

Advertisings

• Famous meerkat-comparing meerkat Aleksandr Orlov's catch phrase is "Simples."
• Jimmy John's ads feature the King of Cold Cuts (Brad Garrett), who refers to the sandwich chain as "Jimmys John's".

Animes & Mangas

• Momoko from Saki is subtitled as adding random plurals to her words. Though in this case it's not so much a habit of unnecessary pluralysis as it a Verbal Tic where she ends words with "-su."
• Haruhi Suzumiya: Tsuruya tends to do this in fanworks, though her Verbal Tic is a bit more complex.
• In the Japanese version of Neon Genesis Evangelion the director was quite insistent that the pilots be called "Children" even individually. Thus Rei is the "First Children", Asuka is the "Second Children", and so on.

Comics Bookses

• The Gronkses in Strontium Dog all do this.

Fans Workses

• In the Animorphs fanfic Akira, Jake jokes that since the cat he burped out is a clone of one called Muffins, there are now two Muffinses.
• The Spiderses.
• Misato says this in Evangelion: ReDeath. "Rule number one: I have two breasteses. Not one. Two."
• Calvin & Hobbes: The Series has an episode where Socrates is cloned, leading to a lot of instances of "Socrateses".
• In a great many Harry Potter fanfics (though not in canon), you will see house elveses talkings like thises.

Filmses — Animations

• In Frozen (2013), Kristoff sings “Reindeers are Better Than People”.

Filmses — Lives-Actions

• In The Gods Must Be Crazy, Kate Thompson does this once in the English dub when talking about "rhinoceroseses" because she had just frantically climbed up a tree and is talking really quickly as a result of her panic.
• Star Wars: The Gungans do this to an extent, with Jar-Jar taking it up a notch.
• In Love Actually there's a scene where Colin Firth has learned clumsy Portuguese so he can tell his housekeeper he's in love with her and ask her to marry him. Frequently messing up the plural and singular tenses. She says, "Thank you, that will be nice," and then when he remarks that she learned English too, she says, "Just in cases."
• Gollum/Smeagol in The Lord of the Ringses.
• In True Romance Drexel points out to Clarence a movie screen in his lair where an actress's "breastseses" are on display, although in his case it's a matter of affectation, not ignorance.

Literatures

• The Lord of the Rings: Gollum and Smeagols does this all the times, yes, filthy hobbitses, yes they doessssss... Played with in the RiffTrax version of Return of the King, wherein "the plural of 'hobbitses' is 'hobbitseses '"
• In Me Talk Pretty One Day, David Sedaris chronicles his experiences learning French as an adult, which includes some of this.
  Things began to come together, and I went from speaking like an evil baby to speaking like a hillbilly. "Is thems the thoughts of cows?" I'd ask the butcher, pointing to the calves' brains displayed in the front window. "I want me some lamb chop with handles on 'em."
• Discussed and defied in the Dresden Files novel "Death Masks". When Harry needs to refer to more than one Elvis, he explains that he will be using the faux Latin plural "Elvii" because using the correct English plural "Elvises" would make him sound like Gollum. Although technically, since "Elvis" ends in -is rather than -us, the Latin plural would technically be "Elves" (pronounced "elv-ease")... which doesn't work quite right when written down, due to being spelled the same as "elves". Of course it's something of a Running Gag that Harry isn't very proficient in Latin anyway and probably wouldn't know that.
• The Chronicles of Prydain: Gurgi talks a lot like Gollum from The Lord of the Rings (see above), with frequent references to "slashings and gashings" or "crunchings and munchings".

Lives-Actions TVs

• One time on Sha Na Na Jocko was being given the Pygmalion treatment so he could ask out a higher class broad; for him the equivalent of "The Rain in Spain Stays Mainly in the Plain" was to say, "Here you go" instead of "Here youse go" when passing the potatoes.
• A Bit of Fry and Laurie:
  • The ""Shoe Shop" sketch has: "I dislike the word 'brothel', Mr. Jowett. I prefer the word 'brothels'. Yes, this is a brothels."
  • In the "Flowers for Wendy" horror-parody sketch, the narrator goes into this toward the end for no real reason: "A tale of walking home, and pavements, and forgettings of birthdays, and rememberings, and wantings to buy flowerings, and discoverings of a flower-stallings just at the right momentings."
• In one of J.D.'s daydream sequences on Scrubs, he was a Mexican migrant worker talking about "apples pie" and "apples juice."
• A Running Gag for Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak whenever a plural category comes up is to do something like "Our category is Living Thingseses."
• Kenny Mayne will do this on Sports Center with the word 'assist', e.g. "Rose with 24 points and 9 assistises."
• Monty Python's Flying Circus, or rather "MONTY...PYTHON'S...FLYING...CIRCUSeses!"
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: When Buffy and the Trio (Warren, Andrew and Jonathan) first meet face-to-face, Warren says they are her "arch-nemesises... ses."
• El Chavo del ocho: In one of the school episodes, El Chavo, Quico and La Chilindrina are taking an extraordinary exam as their final chance to pass their year, with Don Ramón and Doña Florinda as witnesses. At one point, Don Ramón says "papaces y mamaces", as opposed to "papás y mamás", which Profesor Jirafales points as the right way to say it. Don Ramón then replies: "But I said it without abbreviations."
• Letterkenny: It's nots for lacks of intelligences, but this is practicallys Squirrely Dan's defining traits.

Musicses

• In "I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas" at one point the singer insists "No crocodiles, or rhinoceroseses / I only like hippopotamuseses"
• Tim Minchin's poetic/music skit, "Storm": "I get to live twice as long as my great-great-great-great uncleses and auntses."
• Gene Kelly's "Moses Supposes" plays this trope straight with the refrain of "Moses supposes his toeses are roses", and then inverts it with "A Mose is a Mose is a Mose".
• "Extra Gin" by The Doubleclicks uses "catses" to provide a rhyme for "taxes".
• "Hypo Full Of Love" by Alabama 3: Reverend D Wayne Love's kind of loving is "Loving mens! Loving womens! Loving all God's creatures!"
• In "Consejos para padres" ("Advice for parents") by Les Luthiers, a child psychologist mentions a problem afflicting "muchas 'mamáes'" ("many mums", but the correct form in Spanish is "muchas mamás"). The psychologist says that "it can be said both ways... 'Mamáes' or 'mamases'" ^{* 1} those forms are both wrong ^{* 2} further hilarity derives from the fact that in Spanish, the second form is the second person singular of the past preterit of the subjunctive mood of the verb "mamar" (to be breastfed)... which the presenter then starts conjugating.
• Inverted in Jon Lajoie's "WTF Collective 2" with MC Don't Know How to Pluralize Word, who's aware that you're supposed to pluralize when there's more than one of something, but never learned how "all the year I've been alive."

Radioses

• Ted Sheckler, a very strange fellow voiced by Jim Norton on Opie & Anthony, frequently talks about ghosts-ts-ts-s's, breasts-ts-ts-s's, and other things.
• An occasional inversion on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue: If one person in the audience clapped at a joke, and nobody else joined in, Barry would say "Thank you for that applau."

Tabletops Gameses

• Warhammer 40,000: Some renditions of Ork Funetik Aksents use this.

Videos Gameses

• The Hypello in Final Fantasy X do this. You rides the shoopuff?
• In the subtitles, all the Gamorreans [pig people] in Knights of the Old Republic use this trope in their speech.
• The Pagans from the Thief series, including their deity the Trickster, talk this way. The Trickstar is a partial aversion, since he has an alter ego that demonstrates he can speak plainly, but chooses not to in his real guise.
• Jedi Outcast has the Chiss bartender on Nar Shadda talk like this, leading Kyle to comment on how you should "Never trust a bartender with bad grammar."
• Some Touhou fanworks have Marisa Kirisame's "-ze" Verbal Tic as a sort of "-s" sound at the end, so "Reimu, ze" becomes "Reimus", and so on.
• Pokémon
  • "Let me show you my Pokémons (or Pokeymans)". Non-fans or casual fans often don't realize that both the franchise name and the names of individual Pokémon don't get an S on the end; singular and plural are the same. Turned into a Memetic Mutation eventually.
  • This happens on occasion in Pokémon Vietnamese Crystal due to the Translation Train Wreck nature of the game and its many misspellings. The most common mistake is referring to plural Pokémon as ELFS.
    • "THE MONKS IS PRACTICING BUDDHISM."
    • THE MISSLE BOMB MADE USE OF MONSTERS TO DO EVILS."
• Faxanadu's "You do not have enough golds"
• One enemy is Dragon Quest IX is called a claws. When in groups, the game refers to them as "clawses".
• Kingdom of Loathing has fun with plurals. Among them, "alpha-mail pants" becomes "alpha-mail pantses, precioussss".
• In Billy vs. SNAKEMAN, Haus repeatedly refers to the things you scavenge from the Wasteland as "stuffs".
• Super Mario Bros. On the rare occasions Mario has spoken in full sentences, he'll sometimes adds an extra "es" at the end of pluralized words that end with an "s" (ex: "gameses" instead of "games"). Luigi, however, doesn't really display this habit.

Webs Animations

• This trope and an inversion of it are both running gags in Homestar Runner. One example, from A Decemberween Pageant, is the phrase "fifty bag of golds."
• From the Walrusguy Youtube Poop King Harkinian Eats at Ratatoing
  Link: What are those?
  Gwonam: These are mouses.
  Link: Mice.
  Gwonam: No. These are mouses.

Webs Comicses

• Selkie from Selkie has this, though given her physiology, it's not surprising. It's later shown that most Sarnothi are this way when it comes to the English language.
• Everyone speaks like this in Educomix, for good reason.
  Jessica: Guns is not good for the ecos.
• In xkcd #1429, a character uses "data" (plural form of datum) as a singular except when referring to a Star Trek character, whom he treats as grammatically plural.

Webs Videoses

• Backstroke of the West gives us the subtitle "Send these troopseses only." It also gives us such words as "dreamses," "needses," "beened," "livinging," and the especially wonderful "politicseses."
• JonTron once adressed the title of a bootleg game named "Hitting Mices".
  Jon: -hitting Mices? MICES. What, mice wasn't good enough for you, you wanna hit more? You wanna pluralize the plural so you can hit more? You're a monster.

Westerns Animations

• Sal in Futurama does this to emphasize his lower-classness.
  • Sometimes he does the opposite:
    Sal: Whoas! Cripe!
  • At other times, he'll "correct" himself:
    Sal: Don't worries, I've gots an idea, I mean, an ideas.
  • Exaggerated when he even does this with irregular plurals:
    Sal: Has yous ever seens Bigfeet?
  • In his first few appearances, he wasn't doing any of this yet, though. Characterization Marches On and Early-Installment Weirdness, no doubt.
• In Metalocalypse, Skwisgaar Skwigelf and Toki Wartooth do this alls the times to reminds yous that they're from Europes.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • According to Pinkie Pie, the plural of "pegasus" is "pegasuseseses". Sort of doubly wrong in that world because Friendship Is Magic normally uses the Latin-inspired plural "pegasi".
  • Also, Photo Finish seems to have found the pluralses of "magic".
    Photo Finish: FLOOTERSHY! IT IS TIME TO MAKE... DE MAGICKS!
• In older episodes of The Simpsons, Homer usually addresses the Flanders family as the Flandereses.
• This is as significant a part of Beast Boy's speech patterns as Starfire prefixing any noun or subject with "the" in Teen Titans Go!.
• Ralphs T. Guards froms Animaniacs is horribles abouts dis tropes — and so is his wife. No word is safe from being pluralized around these two...ses. Doctor Scratchansniff would doos it every now and then, but nowhere to the extent of the Guards.
• WordGirl villain The Learnerer has this as a verbal tic, doubling all his suffixeses. At first he did it on accident, but intentionally makes it his thing upon realizing the poor grammar was driving WordGirl nuts.
• Pixie, Dixie and Mr. Jinks: Mr. Jinks the Cat always refers to "meeces" (IPA: misez), not "mice", both double-pluralizing it and mispronouncing it. When refering to a single mouse, he'll call it a "meece". He usually gets other plural words correct, though.
• On Rocky and Bullwinkle, the episode titles invoke this twice. One episode title is "One Of Our Meece Is Missing" while another is "Two Moose Is Loose."
• The Patrick Star Show: In "Big Baby Patrick", "baby" Bunny declares that they're having "eggs and spaghetties" for dinner.

Reals Lifes

• Two words: The Internets.
  • Teh Internetz, shurely?
    • Oh noes!
    • And don't call me Shirley.
• This can be common when words are borrowed from other languages.
  • Often happens when Italian foods are served in English-speaking countries. In Italian, ending words with the letter "I" indicates plurality, but in other countries, it's quite common to ask for a panini, biscotti, cannoli, etc; and thus by extension, "two paninis". (Gets very confusing with lasagna: the Italian plural is lasagne, but is the name of the dish a plural, singular, or mass noun? Both spellings are common. And in any case, what do you call two of them?)
  • Lots of people are unaware that 'media' is the plural of 'medium', and will therefore use it improperly.
  • Many people will say that they are "an alumni" of a certain school. "Alumni" is actually the masculine plural; you would be an 'alumnus' if male, or an 'alumna' if female. (For the record, "alumnae" is the female plural.)
  • In modern Hebrew: a single Börek (a type of pastry from the Balkans) is known in Israel as a "Bourekas", which is in fact the plural form of the original word. So the plural form of Bourekas in Hebrew is "Bourekasim", with "im" being the (normally) male plural suffix; the same occurs with "jeansim" and "chipsim". For a female plural example: The Hebrew plural for a single "Empanadas" is "Empanadot".
  • On the flipside, a source of amusement to Jews is gentiles calling themselves "a goyim". Goyim is the plural. The singular is goy.
  • The Polish language took several plurals like "chips" (thinly sliced potatoes), "Eskimoes", "bamboos" or "crackers" (the edible stuff) and adopted them as singulars. You can even hear people talking Transformerses or Star Warses, even though the latter title is easy to translate (not to mention that the films do so, but the merch doesn't).
  • And the English language took the Polish "pączki" and "pierogi" (singular: "pączek" and "pieróg", respectively, although "pieróg" is also old-timey word for a pie) and turned them into absolutely hilarious "paczkis" and "pierogies". So it goes both ways.
  • Swedish, just like Polish, uses "chips" for both the singular and plural forms of potato chip. "Muffin" gets the same treatment — it's called "muffins" both in plural and singular forms. It's also not unusual to hear people refer to multiple muffins as "muffinsar"^note "-ar" is one of the plural suffixes in Swedish.
  • Bulgarian borrows the word "comics" which means "a comic". The plural (comics or comic books) is "comicsi", and hence "comic book hero" translates to "komiksov geroi". "Snacks" is similarly used as singular for various packaged snacks, the plural being "snacksove". Ditto for chips". Biblical Hebrew words also received this treatment — "heruvim" and "serafim" mean "a cherub" and "a seraph", respectively and the latter has even turned into a given name.
  • There's a breed of cat called the Lykoi, whose name is Greek for "wolves," making it a wolves cat.
• The word Child. Its original Old English plural was Childer (compare German Kind, plural Kinder). It then had another Old English plural suffix added to it, becoming Childeren, which then got shortened to Children.
• And just to make things confusing, there are edge cases when this trope is proper English—primarily when you have a cluster of things, typically proper nouns, that already end in an S. If James T. Kirk, James Bond, James "Jimmy" Neutron and James of Team Rocket were dining together, you could describe it as a table of Jameses. Likewise if you met the creator of the Walkyverse webcomics and his wife, David and Maggie, you could say that you had met the Willises. One notable case is the word "summons." "Summon" is a singular noun, but a "summons," referring to an order to appear in court, is also a singular noun. Multiple such orders are thus "summonses."
• In English, when pluralizing a noun, only that noun becomes plural ("big eye" becomes "big eyes"). But many languages decline their adjectives, pluralizing them whenever the noun to which they refer is plural. Now, "bigs eyes" is obviously incorrect; there are virtually no circumstances under which "bigs" is a word, and even the most inexperienced English speaker will catch on to that fairly quickly. But when using a noun as an adjective, as in "laser eyes", it's very common for a foreign language speaker to say "lasers eyes", because "laser" can legitimately be pluralized.
  • This holds true in the rare situations where English has absorbed a complete noun phrase from a foreign language (particularly French). The noun takes the s when pluralizing even when the origin language has mixed up the word order. Thus films noirs and agents provocateurs are correct rather than film noirs or agent provocateurs. (The correct plural being attorneys general rather then attorney generals is a related matter, even though this phrase wasn't taken from French.)
• In Words and Rules, linguist Stephen Pinker discusses how adding a plural can actually change the meaning of a phrase. In one of his studies, people were given a phrase like "red rat eater". If they heard "red rat eater" they weren't sure whether it was "something red, that eats rats" or "something that eats red rats." With an extra plural, they almost always described a "red rats eater" as "something that eats red rats." In other words, Pluralses can have a legitimate function as a modifier, although most people would just change the phrase to either "red rat-eater" or "red-rat eater" without saying "rats".
  • Tell that to the Purple People Eater.^note Though a line in the song clarifies that yes, an eater of purple people was the intended interpretation, making it consistent with the above.
• Inverted in the case of words ended in "s" that people automatically assume are plurals. A common example for spanish speakers is considering the existence of the phrase "a pair of tennis shoes" and assuming that the singular would be "a tenni shoe." A less common but not unheard of example is thinking "analysis" is the plural of "analys", or even thinking the words are plural: "analys", singular: "analy." Yes, actual people speak this way. It doesn't help that in many languages the word for "analysis" doesn't have a second "s" or "z" -- like German "Analyse" or Russian "analiz".
  • In at least one case, this reverse thinking led to the creation of the word "pea". Original Middle English term for this legume was a "pease" (plural "peasen"); however, the final /s/ sound was mistaken for a plural marker in early Modern English and new singular was backformed as a "pea", with "peas" as the new plural. It probably didn't help that "pease" was occasionally used as a mass noun, as in the "pease porridge" of nursery rhyme fame.

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