LANGUAGE CORNER
Graffito/Graffiti
It Takes Two
Or more. This was fun, but it wasn't quite right: "Graffiti is illegal — but it's a beautiful crime." When only one piece of amateur artwork adorns an otherwise bare wall, there's a nice, useful word for it: "graffito." The word in our example — used as a singular, as it so commonly is — is the plural.
Addendum, 2/18/99:
Some challenging e-mail about that item came from Dennis Moran, assistant business editor of the Prague Post. "English borrows copiously if incompletely," he wrote, noting such Associated Press style preferences as "referendums" and "stadiums" (not the Latin plurals "referenda" and "stadia"). Amen to those, and to "curriculums," rather than the pompous "curricula" still widely favored in academic circles.
"In the court of common usage," Mr. Moran went on, "it seems to me that 'graffiti' won out long ago as both singular and plural. Actually, it seems to me that in English it's an uncountable noun, like 'grass.' The word refers to the phenomenon, and doesn't count scrawlings."
Outside of archeological and other scholarly writing, where the singular was uniformly distinguished from the plural, the word is a relatively recent arrival in English, dating only from the 1960's. And while the plural (with or without a plural verb) is more common — as are the multiple scrawlings it defines — the singular, when appropriate, still has defenders among writers and experts on usage. And, when appropriate, it's a nicety worth preserving. Also a sweet kind of word, as Mr. Moran suggested in a subsequent note.
"Actually, I'd love it if people used the word 'graffito,' " he wrote, "I guess because I Iove Italian words ... But I never hear it, so it seems to me doomed." It isn't if writers and editors decide it isn't; we can still use it when one bit of writing is all we're talking about. And it would be a shame if we could no longer say, should the occasion arise, "A lone grafitto graced the chapel wall."
