About tomatoes

"Billies-the-Kid", what a daft coinage, you might think. What's wrong with "Billy-the-Kids"? you might consequently think.
Blame the Italians. Better yet, blame Guiglelmo Recupero. During my happy year in Brescia, which is where I learned Italian, I was told by my friend and mentor, Guiglelmo Recupero, that the plural of pomodoro should not be pomodori but pomidoro. I can see you straining at the leash for an explanation. Nouns in -o make the plural in -i, eg, ragazzo-ragazzi = boy-boys. But, etymologically, the word pomodoro (tomato) is pomo d'oro (golden apple), so, according to my purist informant, the plural of pomo d'oro would be pomi d'oro, so........ well, you grasp the argument.
Me, being an inveterate showoff, went around after that seeking, in fact MAKING, opportunities to talk about "pomidoro". I finally realised that I was the only idiot in Lombardy using this pretentious form.
But I haven't given up, no sir. As anyone who has read this far will know, many pasta dishes are grammatically plural: spaghetti, lasagne, tagliatelle, linguini, etc, so I taught my children to say things like "The spaghetti were really tasty" or "The lasagne are excellent", "Are the tagliatelle fresh?". They drew the line at pomi d'oro, however.
But that lingering memory of Guiglelmo's stricture is the reason why I instinctively wrote Billies the Kid, only realising afterwards how daft it must sound. Never mind, it gave me an excuse to write this piece and show off my knowledge of Italian tomatoes.