Maple Leafs pass the grammar test

Nate Schmidt discussed all kinds of playoff topics before he was asked the hardesthitting question of all: Had he ever considered why the Maple Leafs weren’t called the “Maple Leaves”?

“Oh because of the plural thing?” Schmidt said, laughing after a Capitals practice last Tuesday. “You know, in all my years of watching and following hockey I’ve never thought of that. It’s just the Maple Leafs, you know? That’s the team name.” Then Schmidt paused. “But is it wrong?” No, as it turns out, it’s not. An email to the University of Toronto Department of Linguistics cleared up this confusion. J.K. Chambers, a professor in the department, answered the Leafs-versus-Leaves question the day after the Capitals and Maple Leafs started their first-round series.

“Your conundrum about the pluralization of the Maple Leafs may be less interesting than you were hoping for,” Chambers wrote. “It follows the simple rule that nouns used as proper nouns take regular (productive) plurals even if their common noun counterparts have irregular plurals.”

Let’s unpack this a bit, starting with why Maple Leaf is a proper noun.

History has it that Conn Smythe named the team after the Maple Leaf badge worn by soldiers in the Canadian Army during the First World War.

So, to follow Chambers’s lesson that proper nouns take regular plurals, more than one Maple Leaf badge would be referred to as Maple Leafs. By that same token, two Maple Leaf players are referred to as Maple Leafs, not Maple Leaves. That is how we get the Toronto Maple Leafs.