Comments

  2. Gregory Greenwood says

    Is it even humanly possible to see a T-shirt with that design on it and not want one?

  3. Gregory Greenwood says

    amstrad @ 1;

    Octopus is greek, not latin, so the correct plural is octopodes. Octopi is not a word.

    far be it from me to interfere in another Pharunguloids FSM-given right to pedantry, but I think that ‘octopi’ was used here primarily to evoke the ‘occupy’ component of the Occupy Wallstreet movement.

    ‘Octpode Wallstreet’ just doesn’t scan as well.

  7. 01jack says

    Octopus came from Greek, but is an here an English word. English gets to make its plurals however the hell it wants.

  8. crowepps says

    I hope you already have Ray’s hit CD “Fossil Freeway” where together with Russell Wodehouse and the Ratfish Wranglers, he enchants with these immortal lyrics in “Ammonite”:

    “Your Fibonacci sequence speaks volumes to my soul/
    I trance your inner coils and I start to lose control/
    These armored squid enthrall me they octopi my time/
    Dreaming of your sutures, calamari so divine.”

    http://www.trollart.com/sound/001crusincd.html

  9. says

    amstrad:

    Octopus is greek, not latin, so the correct plural is octopodes. Octopi is not a word.

    The Romans themselves gave Latin endings to Latinized Greek words, so the “But Octopus is Greek, not Latin!” claim is flat-out wrong. In fact, the main point of Latinizing Greek words is to make them more friendly to Latin inflection. And the Romans themselves inflected polypus and coronopus (both with the same -pus in Octopus) such that their plurals are polypi and coronopi, so the “Octopi can’t be that declension!” claim is also wrong.

    So Octopi is a possible plural form allowable for the Neo-Latin word Octopus (and the Greek-derived Octopodes is fine too).

    The same goes for Platypi as a plural for Platypus.

  11. says

    Ianmiller is incorrect here and amstrad’s pedantry is correct. Though I think octopodes is hyper-pedantic for English and that “octopuses” is the correct ENGLISH form. But amstrad is right: “octopi” is as nonsensical as “I would of”.

    The Romans would have known better than to decline octopus as a second declension noun. They would have known it was third declension.

    01jack is also wrong — if it’s an English word, it doesn’t get a Latin plural. Giving is a Latin plural is affected and pretentious — if you’re going to be affected and pretentious then you KIND of need to get it right. Either be unaffected and say “octopuses” or if you insist on using a foreign-language plural, use a real one.

    All this being said, the incorrect plural is the funny one in THIS context. So it wins :)