@jayles - Or that the mother knows something the ostensible father doesn't:

"It is not entirely clear why this fascinates Stephen except that if his ostensible father Simon Dedalus was a cuckold, perhaps he, Stephen, has another “real” and unknown father"

"Many others are instances of 'cuckoldry' in which the young in question are indeed those of their ostensible mother but have been sired by someone other than their ostensible father"

@jayles - "Perhaps that explains why "brains" in the plural is increasingly used when referring to women"

According to Ngram, the increase since 1970 has been less than 100% and the current level is less than it was in 1930, historically having been pretty flat. Meanwhile the instances of "her brain" have increased over the same period by about 400%, and outnumber "her brains" by about 10 to 1, so I'm not quite sure what you're saying here.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=her+brain%2Chis+brains%2Cher+brains%2Chis+brain&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=17&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cher%20brain%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bher%20brain%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BHer%20brain%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Chis%20brains%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bhis%20brains%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BHis%20brains%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Cher%20brains%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bher%20brains%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BHer%20brains%3B%2Cc0%3B.t4%3B%2Chis%20brain%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bhis%20brain%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BHis%20brain%3B%2Cc0

It's the same story at the British National Corpus - "her brain" - 268, "her brains" - 23, "his brain" - 230, "his brains" - 44. I don't think you can really draw any conclusions based on gender here.

There does seem to be a key difference between 'putative' and the other two: if something is putative, it is generally believed, but not usually openly stated (yet), as far as I can see. Whereas the other two refer to something which has been openly stated, but which leave some room for doubt.

In the first three examples, the person named is presumed to be going to take the position named, but no announcement had yet been made at the time.

"The first thing to ask about any real contender for British Sunday glory is who's editing it: the putative editor here is Dominic Mohan, aka the Monday to Saturday editor of the Sun." The Guardian

"Renzi remedy? For all his charisma, Italy’s putative new Prime Minister is far from sure to deliver on his promises " The Independent

"Newt Gingrich, a putative Republican candidate next year, has thrown his weight behind the idea." - The Economist

Here the person presumed to be the founder is not saying:

"Putative Bitcoin Founder Categorically Denies It" - The New York Times

And here it is used in its legal sense, to mean the presumed father.

"If the putative father isn’t at the birth and the unwed mother is on welfare or seeking child support, she must identify the man she thinks is the father. He is then served with legal papers. If he doesn’t respond, judges usually name him the father by default. " - The New York Times

In fact 'presumed' could be used in all the examples above. On the other hand, in the next one, from the Economist blog, "putative" is being used more like "supposed" or "what was ostensibly":

"A recent study found that 25% of putative cod or haddock bought from fishmongers and take-away restaurants were not even the right species."

There seems to be a slight difference in how true you believe something to be. All definitions from Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary:

putative - "believed to be the person or thing mentioned", synonym - presumed (no element of doubt seems to be involved here - Oxford Concise says "Generally considered or reputed to be") - "the putative father of two" - most commonly used with "father(s), author, parents", in fact there's something called 'The Putative Father Registry'.

ostensible - "seeming or stated to be real or true, when this is perhaps not the case (or not necessarily so - Oxford Concise)", synonym apparent - "The ostensible reason for his absence was illness." - seems to collocate especially with "purpose, reason, cause"

supposed - "used to show that you think that a claim, statement or way of describing somebody/something is not true or correct, although it is generally believed to be" , synonym alleged - "When did this supposed accident happen?"

Ostensible and supposed do seem to be quite close, however, but supposed seems to be used with a far wider range of words than the other two.

@jayles - I think something got left off your graph - add 'power' to 'putative' and the picture changes somewhat. If you want to compare frequency, I suggest this might give a more accurate picture (avoiding supposed as a past form) -

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=the+ostensible%2Cthe+supposed%2Cthe+putative&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cthe%20ostensible%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cthe%20supposed%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cthe%20putative%3B%2Cc0

Adding an asterisk to each item will give you common collocations.

"the supposed" seems to be the most common - 253 at the British National Corpus, as opposed to 50 for "the putative" and 36 for "the ostensible"

Hi - this seems a particularly North American custom and as a Brit I probably shouldn't be commenting, but the answer to your question can easily be found by searching for "family plaque established" at Google Images.

It would seem that in this sort of plaque (with est. + date) the word 'family' is usually added to the surname, so "The Myers Family" would be standard. But if you don't want "family", just use the plural - "The Myers" or possibly "The Myerses" (whichever you usually use) - one website suggests that we don't add -es to names where the final s sounds like z, but in Britain we talk about 'keeping up with the Joneses', so I'm not convinced by that one. On the other hand, Myers does indeed seem to be the most common plural form - Googling "life with the Myers" gets eleven hits, "life with the Myerses" - three. And there are a few blogs (well, three) which include "life with the Myers" in their titles.

But what seems clear is that a possessive apostrophe isn't used in this case: you are talking of your family as an entity, not as possessing anything.

Google oddities again - when I Googled "life with the Myers", it showed 1,190,000 hits, but then I noticed there were only two pages, and 1,190,000 turned out to be 11!

Subwait , sub-wait and sub wait all seem to be used, either for an area where you wait for test results, or small waiting areas away from the main one. I thought it was a purely American term, but I've just found it used on the website of an NHS hospital in Wales (and on a closer look, there are quite a few British instances, at Guy's and St Thomas'for example).

This is from the Gwent Healthcare NHS Trust:

"Patients book in at a central reception desk where they are given a numbered ticket, all patients wait in one area until they are called through to the next "sub wait" area of the speciality they are waiting for. This ensures confidentiality as the announcement states only a number and an area. Finally they are then called from the sub wait area to a consulting room."

What do you mean 'what other words' - I'm confused, as sub in subwait is surely a prefix, differentiating various subwait areas from the main waiting area, and there must be hundreds of words with sub as a prefix - More Words list 1044 words starting with sub, mainly as a prefix: submarine, subdominant, subeditor etc.

But I presume that's not what you mean, even though I would say 'subwait area' falls into the same category. So do you mean simply as one word?

"Can you give me a sub" or "Can you sub me" - give me an advance on my wages

Or is it that you felt it was mainly limited to use in latinate words, such as subatomic? So how about these (all listed at More Words) - origins according to Online Etymology:

subgoal - goal is 'of uncertain origin'
subbreed - breed is from OE
subclan - clan is from Gaelic
subcooler - cool is from OE
subfield - field from OE

So the answer to your question is probably lots. And as to your wondering, I don't think the derivation of prefixes and suffixes matters much: they quickly get taken up for words with all sorts of derivations. As early as the 16th century, people were adding -ize (Latin, taken from Greek) suffixes to all manner of verbs already established in English, and not just those that had come from Latin. And think how 'pre' and 'post' are used - 'precook, pre-wedding jitters, postgraduate' (graduate may have come from medieval Latin, but the word postgraduate is of American origin).

This is from the Online Etymology Dictionary entry on 'sub':

'The prefix is active in Modern English, sometimes meaning "subordinate" (as in subcontractor); "inferior" (17c., as in subhuman); "smaller" (18c.); "a part or division of" (c.1800, as in subcontinent).'

These words were all coined in English, not taken from another language. Its use in 'subwait area' doesn't seem to me that different (apart from the dropping of 'ing') , and would seem to match that in 'subcontinent'.

http://www.morewords.com/starts-with/sub/

@Lance - "In the UK I only ever heard these phrases ..."

As a few of us know, Hairy Scot no longer lives in the UK, so here he is correctly using past simple, not a slang version of present perfect, as in your examples. If we add "When I was" all becomes clear - "When I was in the UK I only ever heard these phrases ..."

Ivorian Salomon Kalou, in the short My World Cup Dream, on BBC World News, calls it Ivory Coast.

@Chris B - The only other one I can find is Gibraltar, and a few island or island groups with 'island' in the name. Some single islands have the same adjectival form as the name, eg Pitcairn Island; some plural groups, such as the Solomon Islands can take a singular form for the adjective - the government there refers to itself as the Solomon Island Government, for example, but also seem to be used in the plural.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adjectival_and_demonymic_forms_for_countries_and_nations

Some commentators may be following the FIFA guidelines, but the print and online media certainly aren't. A site search of BBC Sport returns 9130 for Ivory Coast, with a mere 9 for Côte d'Ivoire, at Sky Sports it's 43,200 to 167, and the picture at the rest of the British media seems pretty similar. Google Search gives:

"Colombia beat Ivory Coast" - 165,000
"Colombia beat Côte d'Ivoire" - 9720
"Colombia beats Ivory Coast" - 196,000
"Colombia beats Côte d'Ivoire" - 2010