the corner office

A church yard near us. I'm pretty sure these are crocuses, but I was itching to write "I'm pretty sure these are croci".

This led me to a quick tour of the dictionaries in our house. The first of these, on the shelf behind me in the study, is my old schooldays Oxford Paperback Dictionary. It told me that the plural of crocus is crocuses. Boo. We have two more Oxford dictionaries, one of them an Oxford Concise English dictionary. Concise is relative I think; it's heftier than my Paperback version - but it doesn't give plurals. Then I checked my monster two-volume Oxford Universal Dictionary which my parents had bought as part of an encyclopedia set before I was born, no plurals either.

Then I went all 21st century and checked online, and according to Wikipedia at least, both forms of plural are acceptable. I also found a few articles online saying the same thing, including one quoting an online poll which found that roughly two thirds of people use crocuses and one third use croci.

Which is slightly disappointing, because if croci was entirely the wrong plural, then you could get away with saying something like "oh, wouldn't it sound lovely if the plural of crocus was croci". But if it's only sort-of correct, and a third of people choose to say croci, while two thirds along with the OED don't, then it's a fair bet that the croci cohort are pretty much all on the more pretentious side of society, at which point, as much as you might like the sound of croci, you're left with little choice but to slum it with crocuses.