In the Venn diagram of Lotus enthusiasts and grammar pedants, there’s quite a number in the overlap. Certainly that appears to be the case if our email inbox is anything to go by every time a reader is irked by our use of the plural ‘Lotuses’. 

They’re quick to cite a press release issued by Lotus Cars in 1969 in which Hethel HQ decreed that the plural of Lotus is Lotus. It read:

In the interests of standard grammar and understanding please note that in future all Lotus literature etc. will feature the following:

1. The plural of Lotus will be Lotus.
2. The possessive of Lotus will be Lotus’

This, we hope, will eliminate the use of the horrible words: Loti and Lotuses.

While we might not agree that the Latin plural Loti is horrible, we agree that it is incorrect. Latin plurals are optional in English (how often do you see ‘media’ treated as a singular; how rarely do you see the word ‘stadia’?) and should certainly never be applied to a proper noun.

Lotuses, however, is not merely acceptable but the grammatically correct plural of Lotus. The key point in the press release from Lotus all those decades ago is that Lotus as a plural will appear in “all future Lotus literature.”

Any organisation is perfectly within its rights to declare a house style for its own brand, just as Mini insists its name is spelt in capitals, Apple relocates the capital in iPhone and Smart prefers a lowercase ’s’.

The rest of the world is perfectly at liberty to adopt another party’s house style. Or not. MINI looks as if it’s shouting and smart looks like your shift key had failed, yet Iphone just looks wrong.

One way to appease Lotus’s rule is to go with ‘Lotus cars’ as the plural, but as an editor it’s very hard to justify and extra word that adds no meaning. So we’ll be sticking with Lotuses and we’ll just have to take the flak.