Hey, today I have a story featuring bacteria for you. And at the end of the article I’ll have a little riddle for you.
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Table of Contents
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Irregular Plurals like BACTERIUM – BACTERIA
Before we get started with the story, let’s focus on the word BACTERIA for a minute. This is the plural form. Do you know what the singular form is? It’s BACTERIUM. This plural form is irregular and comes from Latin. There are more words like this. Have a look at these examples:
We say STRATUM in singular and STRATA in plural. By the way, a STRATUM is one of usually many layers of a substance (such as rock).
Another example. We say ERRATUM or CORRIGENDUM to refer to an error in a printed work discovered after printing and shown with its correction on a separate sheet. The plural forms of these two nouns are ERRATA and CORRIGENDA respectively.
And there are lots of other words that originate from Latin and end in -UM. Most of them, though, have double plural forms, like for example AQUARIUM, which is a glass container in which fish and other water animals and plants can live. In plural you can say either AQUARIUMS or AQUARIA.
Do you know any other nouns like this? If you do, write them down below in the comments. I’m eager to see what you’ve come up with.
The Story
And now let’s get back to bacteria.
Here’s a story about bacteria talking about life…
Younger Bacterium: Hey, tell me one thing. I’ve noticed we’re all following your lead. Is it because you’re the oldest?
Older Bacterium: No, but I know where to find some leftovers that we can eat.
Here you can see some leftovers:
Younger Bacterium: The journey is so long and boring. Let’s talk.
Older Bacterium: What do you want to talk about? Food?
Younger Bacterium: Food and other necessities of life. Tell me, why do people abhor us in the first place? We are so teeny they can’t even see us after all.
Older Bacterium: People have loathed us since they made the connection between us and the diseases some of us cause.
Bacteria are really teeny tiny, which means very, very small.
To see them you need a microscope.
And usually not like this one. A much more powerful one, an electron microscope.
And one more thing. If you want to see how bacteria and many other things differ in size, I have an article How Big and How Small Things Are – Size Comparisons on my Prospero Coder blog, so make sure to check it out. You can also watch my video on my Prospero Science channel:
Back to Our Story
And now let’s get back to our story…
Younger Bacterium: Do we really cause diseases?
Older Bacterium: Most of us don’t, but some of us do. We race pell-mell through people’s bodies and sometimes we get out of hand.
Younger Bacterium: How do they keep us at bay?
Older Bacterium: They fight tooth and nail. Sometimes they win, sometimes we do. It’s worst when they keep their houses spic-and-span. There’s no leftover food for us then.
Younger Bacterium: It’s not easy to be a bacterium nowadays.
Vocabulary
Here’s the vocabulary again:
| follow someone’s lead | to do the same thing that sb else has done |
| leftovers /ˈlɛftˌoʊvɚs/ | food that has not been finished at a meal and that is often served at another meal |
| necessities of life | things that a person must have in order to survive |
| abhor | to dislike very much, to hate |
| teeny | very small, tiny |
| loathe | to hate very much |
| make a/the connection | to understand that there is a relationship between two or more things |
| pell-mell | in a confused and hurried way |
| out of hand | not controlled |
| keep at bay | to not allow sb to come closer while attacking or trying to approach sb |
| tooth and nail | with a lot of effort and determination |
| spic-and-span | very clean and neat |
Riddle
And now I have a riddle for you. Here you can see an image.
What do you think you can see? If you know the answer, write it down in the comments down below. I will give you the correct answer in my next post.