Music production

The twelfth entry is l’image stéréo, and the word at the end of it breaks a rule an English reader has only just finished learning. French adjectives agree: une prise propre, des prises propres, the ending following the noun in gender and number. Stéréo does not. It is a clipped form of stéréophonique, and the dictionaries give it as invariable, so the plural is des images stéréo and des enceintes stéréo, with no s anywhere. Mono behaves the same way, and so does vidéo when it describes something: des jeux vidéo, des cassettes vidéo. The trap is that the same clipped words take an s the moment they become nouns. This list says le placement des micros, because un micro is a thing and things are counted, and des vidéos are clips somebody watches. So the test is the job the word is doing, not its shape. Placed after a noun and describing it, the clipped word is left alone; standing on its own behind an article, it takes the plural like any other noun. English never has to ask the question, which is why the missing s looks like a misprint.