I thought this was settled

The interminably tiresome issue of how to make "referendum" plural has reared its ugly head again, although  of late it had seemd fairly settled. Here's my 2016 view:

<pre-script source="here">
Addenda agenda corrigenda memoranda propaganda pudenda...

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All the examples might be thought  to justify an -enda ending for this plural, but they are all derived from a gerundive (an adjective – which can be pluralized) rather than from a gerund (a noun – which [vide infra] can't.)

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The nouns qualified by those adjectives are all "things/stuff/matters..." ["to be done/corrected/ remembered/propagated/ashamed of"].

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The time has come, unfortunately, for the pointless, annoying, never-ending discussion about the plural of THE R WORD.

Let's take as our starting point  The Speech of Cicero for Aulus Cluentius Habitus:

..[2022 précis:.in para 137 he's considering an issue on which the Senate is uncertain],
and uses the phrase "referendum ad populum"]

This referendum ad populum ["the putting of a question to the people"] was soon abridged to plain referendum; but the phrase shows that the word was, in Latin, a gerund. Now I'm not going to argue that English has to follow the rules of Latin. That ridiculous notion has long plagued studies of English. But to quote one distance learning site:

Forming the gerund: The gerund is formed much the same way... . All gerunds are considered neuter nouns and there is NO nominative case and NO plural form.

OK, there is no plural of referendum  in Latin; so how do we form it in English? There is little doubt about how plurals are formed in English. In most cases (and I wonder how to quantify that most – hmmm...

<further-musings>
This "hmm", as hmm's sometimes do, led to this post.
</further-musings> 

...) the rule is simple: add an s. Phonologically it's not quite that simple: dependent on what's being pluralized, you add either /s/ or /z/ or /i:z/ or /ɪz/. But there are quite a few exceptions: sheep/sheep, man/men, ox/oxen, basis/bases...

<pre-script>

The need to refer to referendum in the plural (the referendums-endum?)  has come to the fore of late because of Putin's shenanigans in eastern Ukraine – although in such cases the word should be something more like ForegoneConclusion-dum. And presumably the BBC's pronunciation unit (if such a thing still exists) has laid down the law: all BBC journalists (I thought until this Wednesday), and most of the people interviewed by the mainstream media (apart from a few ignorami...

<note type="for the irony-impaired">
Thie is a JOKE. It's not quite original, as I'm recycling my one contribution to the Today programme, about twenty years ago – something about "ignorami with hidden agendae".
</note>

But Razia Iqbal  (who presented The World Tonight on Wednesday) obviously didn't get the memo. So she confirmed the painful discovery I made back in 2016:

Argh indeed. Why does hypercorrectness have to  be considered "formal"? It's not formal, it's just WRONG.

Before I go, a bit of TV criticism. I've been watching the Beeb's Crossfire, but was singing during the last episode (so recorded it). I'm not sure I'll bother with it though. I mean it's quite suspenseful, and Keeley Hawes is good, but there's not much plot developmen to sustain a 3-hour mini-series. There's a love-triangle, but one corner of it died in the first hour and another corner died in  the second, leaving just our heroine running around a hotel dodging terrorists' bullets. Besides, there's no element of ctrossfire in it; there are just goodies and baddies.

Well, that's all she wrote.

b

Update: 2022.10.02.18:00 – Added <inline-ps />
Update: 2022.10.03.11:20 – Added <inline-pps />
Update: 2022.10.05.12:20 – Added PPS

PPS In my more manic moments I have floated an idea that neither would nor should fly. But it's interesting:

<reductio-ad-absurdum>
There are in principle four cases, each of which could have its own word:

• referendum (one of these things)
• referendums (two or more of these things)
• referenda (on the analogy of "agenda", a list of questions to be put to the people: to be clear, the usage would be "a referenda")
• referendas (two or more such lists)

Fortunately we don't live in a world where this could ever work.👺
</reductio-ad-absurdum>

Plus ça change...

 ...c'est la même shows.

I've said before

<pre-script post="this">
A choral singer knows he's getting on when, as for me this term, the next concert includes three choral pieces all of which he's sung before with another choir or choirs.
</pre-script>

This time, though, they were all sung by Wokingham Choral Society.  This poster gives the details:

We sang Ein Deutsches Requiem (we sang in German at the time, and we will be singing again in German, so I'm not sure why the poster gives the English) in 2011.

<tangent type="Elitist? So bite me.">
The choir had sung it previously (in English) three times, starting in 1970, and at roughly ten year intervals; so it's due for a reprise. I wonder if they sang the Novello translation, with its 'How lovely are all thy dwellings, Lord'. To me that ALL sticks out as strangely bathetic – the sort of thing you might say to an estate agent?

I know it's needed for a strict syllable-count (the original for 'are all your' is sind deine), but  what would be wrong with 'a-are'?

Fortunately (for me, at least) this time we'll be singing Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnüngen.
</tangent>

We haven't sung Brahms' Schicksalslied  in a concert, but it figures in the Past Concerts section of our website because it was programmed for a concert that was cancelled because of COVID (so we did rehearse it, on Zoom – not the whole choir, but as many as could tolerate Zoom's shortcomings).

As for the Purcell, we sang it in 2017 in an all-Purcell concert. But I had sung it before with my chapel choir in my first undergraduate year.

<autobiographical-note>
My college was, at the time (they've since seen the light) all male – the only concession to equality of the sexes was that ladies could dine at formal  hall (but only at high table, and I was present at the first occasion for that in September 1971...

<oh-yeah>
(And if any Oxbridge-savvy heckler protests that an undergraduate wouldn't have been there so early [Full Term doesn't usually start until early October], an  exception was made for people offering Modern and Medieval  Languages {don't ask😉} for Part I {I said don't ask😉}, as it was assumed that our oral proficiency would be better  after a year abroad rather than a year of lectures: so that the oral exams should happen before Full Term started.)
</oh-yeah>

...).
</autobiographical-note>

L'Envoi

Incidentally, I share Jon Sopel's bewilderment, expressed in this tweet:

I'm no republican, and in fact approve of pomp and ceremony. But in the last few days there has been a distinct lack of proportion in the public reaction to the death of a remarkable and wholly admirable lady – to whom our strangely appropriate concert will be dedicated.

b