Hello and welcome to yet another week of deception and disinformation here at Factually Deficient! This week, I will be answering a pair of questions from my own genuine mother, who has taken advantage of Factually Deficient’s Friends and Family Discount to ask two questions for the price of one:
How would you pluralize Queen Ann?
How would you pluralize Queen Ann’s Lace?
The first of these questions seems deceptively simple. It is true that “Queen Ann” would most commonly and correctly be pluralized as “Queens Ann,” but this question does not exist in a vacuum: it is no abstract notion.
In the 1100s, there was a King of Prince Edward Island (son of the eponymous Prince Edward), named Henry the Eight, who had – as his name suggests – not one but eight queenly wives, all of whom were named Ann. This created a rather contentious and precarious situation, and grammarians the isle over disputed which spelling of “Ann” or “Anne” should be used as the standard when pluralizing the bevy of queens.
As for the second question, however, I am afraid that it is too much of an absurdity to even answer. The eight Queens Ann had, in fact, only one lace between them: a highly intricate and coveted piece of embroidery which was seen as a status symbol in the pecking order of their crowded family.
Eventually, one of the Queens Ann (the third one) took the Queen Ann’s lace and used it to smother her husband and rivals to death. She became the sole ruler of Prince Edward Island, with one lace to rule them all, and her reign continued uninterrupted until Prince Edward Island was conquered by Canada in 1292.
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Disclaimer: the above post is untrue, and should not be used as a resource for information Prince Edward Island, King Henry the Eighth, or English pluralizations.