Octopus plural

[jack]

I thought this was settled in my mind but now I looked up Octopus plural on the internet again and this time it says Linnaeus made it up we can use whatever plural we like and "octopi" has been common since the beginning even if it wasn't grammatically faithful at the time...?

Maybe we should ban saying any of "octopuses" "octopi" and "octopodes" are any more correct than each other and let people use whichever they like??

Comments

[redbird]

"Linnaeus made it up" just means that we know who came up with the word; it's not an exception to some Adamite naming or Platonically more "real" names like "horse."

That said, anyone who gets pedantic about "-pi" being wrong had better be happy with "octopodes," which is valid under the "use the forms of the root languages."

At some point I may look up some animals whose English names have non-Indo-European roots so I can ask those people what they think the proper plurals of things like "kangaroo" and "indri" are, and why.

[highlyeccentric]

Kangaroos. If you wanted to pluralise it in the relevant indigenous language, you wouldn't be spelling it with a K, first up...