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A round of questions for the 'shepherd-in-chief'

 All Things Catholic by John L. Allen, Jr.
  Friday, August 15, 2008 - Vol. 7, No. 47  

Anyone who's ever learned a foreign language knows that perhaps 50 percent of a language is predictable according to its own rules, and the rest simply is what it is, the product of history and culture rather than logic. Try explaining to an ESL student why the plural of "mouse" is "mice," but the plural of "spouse" is not "spice," and you'll find that going over the rules really doesn't help; in the end, that's just how things are.