Well I stand corrected on my testicles. That sounds painful but I think you get my drift. I was clearly wrong thinking that testes was the medically correct plural.

I suppose my point was really about getting a message across and there are lots of examples of strict misuse with currency. Think how often news refers to the (Chinese) Yuan as a currency for instance.

I can well imagine how pence could creep in from a spreadsheet of figures - the word to use if you assume all the figures are plural - may well account for its use by Chancellors.

Am slightly amused, given the thread title, by the automatically censored word, used by Chaucer, in my previous post.