"Vis-a-vis" writes: "I feel like joining you in your half-hearted protest against using thrips for the singular as well as for the plural, for there is no real reason why we should adopt the whole grammatical structure of a foreign word, when we want a new term in the English language. Foreigners do not behave so critically when they want to use an English word. I have before me Loudon's Encyclopoedia of Plants and I find that when our English word 'Jones ' becomes latinized to represent a plant, it is not Jones-ia, but Jo-ne-sia Africana. Nor do we always behave so critically. We have no rule; sometimes it is one way, sometimes another. When we have taken 'depot' to signify a railway station we have saved the orthography while adopting the pronunciation. In 'tardy' (tardif) we have taken the French sound, and changed the spelling; in 'tapis' (carpet) we take the spelling, but pronounce it in English. If your readers would only all agree that 'thrips,' plural, should be 'thrip' in the singular, I believe custom would soon sanction it; but if we must say 'thrips' in the singular, and still 'thrips' in the plural, I suppose we must".