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.
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...) 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>