Friday mornings are usually full of drowsy cheer, knowing that we’ve made it, and the weekend will be here in a few short hours. But not this Friday morning, for this Friday morning, your friends at Jalopnik received a haunting email—an email confirming that Lexus believes the plural of “Lexus” to be “Lexus.”
Perhaps your neighbor owns three Lexus. Your local car dealer might be running a “buy two Lexus, get one free” sale. (It won’t be.) When counting cars as a game on a road trip, you might tally double-digit Lexus.
Disturbing, isn’t it? Our burden, spurred by that email, is now yours.
This all started when a Twitter user asked the Lexus account the big question they now probably wish hadn’t been answered: “How do you refer do multiples of your cars? Lexuses? Lexi? Much Lexus?”
None of the above, according to a tweet signed by an“RR” and ending with a nerd emoji. It’s just Lexus.
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Is this a cry for attention, like a bad haircut that will stain family scrapbooks for years to come? Or is it an act of betrayal, targeting the people who trusted Lexus not to break their minds and their spirits?
Not only does “Lexus” as a plural sound wrong, but there’s an entire Wikipedia page explaining why it most likely is very wrong. Sure, Wikipedia isn’t the place to get your final information on things, but it is a good starting point when, you know, deciding the plural form of the name of your car brand:
In English, the plural form of words ending in -us, especially those derived from Latin, often replaces -us with -i. There are many exceptions, some because the word does not derive from Latin, and others due to custom (e.g., campus, plural campuses). Conversely, some non-Latin words ending in -us and Latin words that did not have their Latin plurals with -i form their English plurals with -i.
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The only solution here, of course, is to ignore Lexus, which you might not have thought about in a while anyway—making that idea rather easy to carry out. The plural of Lexus is whatever sounds right in the moment, or just rearranging the sentence to avoid pluralizing the word at all (recommended).
Regardless, your weekend, which you might have spent strolling under the sun in a park or enjoying a movie, will now be spent recovering from the mental strain Lexus has caused. There are no sun-drenched parks in a world where “Lexus” is the plural form of “Lexus,” and there sure isn’t any enjoyment.
For that, we are truly sorry.
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