Confession:

I’ve already told the people this involves, and I’d feel even better with the support of my readers.

The other night, I went to a Met game. Lovely time, though they lost. My family was hanging out with two other families, one of whose last names was and remains “Trabulus.” Pronounced: “TRAB-you-liss.”

There were maybe ten of us altogether, and we showed up at Gate E with staggered time frames – two sets of parents drove, with everyone else taking the subway from various places. So, with the game about to start and hunger brewing, and the group not yet whole, some of the fellowship went in, to grab seats and hot dogs, as you would. No problem at all.

Finally, we locate our entire party. My father, asking about some of the Trabulus family that he didn’t see, got the response from me that, “Some of the Trabuli are inside.”

How clever I was. I liked it. Turning Trabuluses into Trabuli. It’s the kind of joke that’s not really a joke, y’know, like how I write most of the time, sans punchlines.

But as I was walking through Soho the next afternoon, I found a loophole in my statement. An error in my ways. And I laughed out loud at it.

I’m not sure how it works exactly, but if Trabulus falls in the same Latinate category as “syllabus,” that is, fourth declension, its plural would not be “Trabuli,” but rather, “Trabulus,” pronounced with a longer u:”Trab-yoo-loose.” Just like the plural of “syllabus” is NOT NOT NOT “syllabi,” but pronounced “syll-ah-boose.” To be honest, I could always tell more than I needed to know about a professor’s personality if they chose to say “syllabi” instead of the embarrassing “syllabuses,” while handing out said papers on the first day of class.