Joel Lillo, Fox Valley WELS has left a new comment on your post "They Want Y'all To Debate the Small Stuff - And Le...":
"The Hoi Polloi" is one of my grammatical pet peeves. Since "hoi" means "the," it must be an expression dreamed up by the Department of Redundancy Department.
It's like "VAT Tax." (That would make it "Value Added Tax Tax, for crying out loud.)
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GJ - Joel Lillo, Fox Valley, is consistently wrong.
Hoi polloi means "the many" in Greek, but the two words together have become a noun in normal usage. Grammatical usage in one language does not transfer into the new language when those adaptions are made.
A graduate of the Sausage Factory might say "the polloi" but no one would know what he was trying to say. Perhaps the idea is to arouse the curiosity of the audience, so the poorly educated bumpkin can say, "I. Studied. Greek."
We normally say, "The data shows..." even though data is plural for datum. Data has become a singular in English.
I suppose the rubes in Fox Valley say VAT tax, but I have always heard it simply described as the Value Added Tax. Since the acronym is all English, that is not too difficult to grasp.
