Minor annoyance, but 'Agenda' is plural.
Submitted by Scylax on Wed, 2009-09-16 00:52.
I print many pages for my planner from this site but never got the editable versions to work, so I use them as is. The 'Agenda' pages are very useful, and I especially like the one with two sections to the page. Trouble is I like accuracy. For the singe section pages the title should surely be 'Agendum' and the multi-section page the plural 'Agenda'.
Minor I know but I'm so fussy, and sad as it seems, I really care!
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Your Agendum
:)
OK, would you care to point out which ones committed this faux pas ?
If any of the Dynamics are guilty, I will gladly fix them.
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"I think the surest sign that there is intelligent life out there in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." (Calvin and Hobbes/Bill Waterson)
In Latin, certainly, but in
In Latin, certainly, but in English it seems that "agenda" is absolutely accepted in the singular, with "agendas" in the plural. This, mind you, is according to my Oxford Canadian dictionary, but I doubt an American version would be any different.
In fact, "agendum" is not in the Oxford.
Dictionary.Com says...
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/agenda
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"I think the surest sign that there is intelligent life out there in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us." (Calvin and Hobbes/Bill Waterson)
Firstly I think the problem
Firstly I think the problem is only in the planner kits, but I will check the dynamic ones later if I can and see. Thanks!
And yes, I know the inaccurate use has crept in, although I suspect less here than in America (I am honestly not a snob over this, in many ways I think much American pronunciation etc is better), but I care about the exact accuracy and I know a lot of people who would agree. Being a word which IS Latin, I like the Latin rules to apply!
Thanks very much everyone, and I'm grateful you haven't laughed at me :)
not correct
In latin agenda means "things that have to be done", a gerundivum form for those with some knowledge of latin (sorry I don't know the english word for gerundivum). Which is why our word agenda in dutch means planner, because you write down your todo's in them. The singular is indeed agendum.
But the things you write down on these lists are things to be discussed with or communicated to someone else a la gtd. So technically the word is not correctly used here at all, whether in singular or in plural form.
However, the lists are designed to hold more than one item per person, so the plural is "less incorrectly" used here in my opinion.
Only at DIYP
can I get my fix of pen and paper AND a language lesson. Gosh, I'm such a geek!
To be utterly pedantic
No ... me ... pedantic? [end sarcasm]
:D
According to an elderly lawyer I worked with in the 1980's who was then approaching 90 and, from his attitude, considered Dickens to be a slap-dash young thing who didn't know how to write correct English...
Agenda is a list of agendum.
Agendum are the individual items on an agenda.
So a meeting agenda consists of many individual agendum.
... Making a coffee break in a meeting an agendum. ;)
This means - if the template has one line on it then it can be an Agendum template. If you can record more than one item then it's an Agenda.
This has been a most
This has been a most interesting thread. But it does seem like "agenda" should be there to stay.
As a native speaker of French, and only a second-language speaker of English, I often cringe at the way many French words are used in the English in more or less appropriate ways, to say nothing of the spelling or pronunciation. But languages evolve. The French language, for example, has many words starting with W, but all of them come from other languages. Like "wigwam." There were no proper French words to designate those realities, so foreign words were "borrowed" and adapted. Because I live in British Columbia I have the chance of seeing and hearing some words as they are spelled and said by First Nations people, which is different from the way English and French has pronounced them.
So languages evolve. If one really wants to be a purist, then, Ygor's "agenda" should probably be a "planner" and no word of latin origin should be used at all to avoid _faux pas_. However, the word "planner" in English, etymologically speaking, arose from the French "plan," which itself comes from the Latin "planum," which had a different-enough meaning to NOT be used on the cover of an agenda.
This being said, I'd love Scylax (the OP) to go after the folks who have ensconced "status quo" in the English language. It's "statu," no ending -s!! To each their pet peeve.
Probably the inkhorners
You can possibly blame the people who came up with the Latinate 'inkhorn' words in the 16th & 17th century in England. They were people who wanted the English language to be improved and to remove words they felt were unworthy. So they invented words based on ancient Latin and Greek.
We could have been stuck with some of their sillier ideas like:
adminiculation (to aid), deruncinate (to weed), illecebrous (delicate), etc, etc