Harry Dewey's posting on this topic was very much along the lines of my own thought on the subject, though I wouldn't call a pronunciation-corrector a "terrorist and thug" -- just a boor who doesn't understand how language really works. (Harry, do I get credit for moderating my rhetoric here, if not on Alpine-L?) However, I wanted to comment on Harry's statement, > ALL Latin genera are >automatically English words, spellable with a capital OR lower-case >initial letter, always correctly pluralizable with an -s or -es ending, >and always pluralized with a lower-case initial letter. In general, this is the rule we editors follow, but it gets more complicated than that. The lower-case initial letter is used when the genus name is accompanied by an article (Eng. 'a', 'the') or when it is pluralized; the upper-case initial appears only when the genus name is italicized and being used in the sense of a taxonomic entity. As for pluralizing, we use the plural forms from the source language for certain genera where this is a longstanding usage in English: gladiolus, gladioli; cactus, cacti; narcissus, narcissi. There is a widely observed (though not universal) rule in editing not to pluralize with -es and not to use the possessive 's when a word ends in a syllable like -sus, -sos, -ses. Thus, we would write "Marcus's face" but "Jesus' face", and I suppose "a cactus's habitat" but "a narcissus' habitat". In difficult situations, one can avoid making a decision about plurals by writing "Gladiolus [italic] species" or "species of Gladiolus [italic]". (I can't change fonts in the e-mail application I use, but I don't get viruses in it, either.) With best wishes for the holidays, and for quick recovery to the gardens of our friends on the US East Coast! Jane McGary