Irritating license holders grammatically incorrect

While I must admit quite a few things piss me off, it’s usually the small daily irritants that get me the most. Yes, those trivial, almost insignificant problems always seem to show up in crops, and very few of them are fixable.

However, I must make my peace about one thing we all see pretty much every day: alumni license plate frames.

Driving down the freeway, one is bombarded with cars proudly proclaiming their owners graduated from this college or that university. In most cases, these license plates say “Alumni” at the top of the frame and the name of the driver’s alma mater at the bottom. This has to stop.

I have nothing against showing everybody where you went to college, but those license plate frames are just wrong.

“Alumni” is the plural masculine form of a noun derived from the latin verb, “alere,” which means to nourish. In singular form, the noun is “alumnus” for men and “alumna” for women.

To get to the point of my rant, license plate frames that say “alumni” are, for all practical purposes, grammatically incorrect. If the car’s owner wants to advertise his or her alma mater, that person should display a license plate frame that has the gender-appropriate singular noun. Ridiculous, maybe. But it bugs me, and I have a right to speak my peace.

The only loopholes in this logic are somewhat unlikely. Using an “alumni” license plate frame is acceptable if there are two people in the car (or on the pink slip) who attended the same college or if the frame is an advertisement for the Alumni Association or a comparable organization. As for anyone wearing an alumni sweatshirt, unless the word “association” or something comparable follows the giant “alumni” plastered across your chest, you are wrong, just plain wrong.

So, if you are one of those people who drive a car with an “alumni” license plate, I beg you to reconsider your decision. Make a statement and get a grammatically correct frame or just take it off your car. It really is for the good of all mankind. Because those frames really do piss me off, and the last thing the world needs is another irritated and angry driver on the 405 Freeway.

Allison Baldwin is a sophomore journalism major and the assistant city editor of the Daily Forty-Niner.