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

[highlyeccentric]

Linaeus made it up, but he made it up *in Latin*. Bad latin is the scourge of 19th c science...

[jack]

:)

That sounds apt. But does it tell me which plurals are ok? (Other than, "whatever" :))

[highlyeccentric]

Nope! You have to pick your grammatical team, before that information is useful to you. Team Prescriptivist will probably say octopi, because of original usage. A subset within team Prescriptivist might strike out for octopodes on grounds of Greek, arguing that even if Linnaeus did not write octopodes he *ought to have*.

But Team Descriptivist (including functional) Grammar most likely would say both octopuses and octopi are in use therefore both valid. Then you'd need to refer to your house style guide: I'm pretty sure guides operating on principles of Plain English would say octopuses at least for the non-specialist audience.

Some confusion may be encountered because prescriptivists refer to dictionaries, but the OED (highly regarded by prescriptivists) is in fact a *descriptive* dictionary. It gives equal weight to octopuses and octopi and lists octopodes as rare. The OED has never cared to tell you what you *should* use, merely to describe what people *do* use and have used.

And Team Webster, who was a sort of revisionist in favour of making the language make *more sense* than it did in his day, might well Octopuses because it's neater in English. Which is different to *because that's what people already do*.

[jack]

LOL! Good description.

"You have to pick your grammatical team"

In fact, what I'm actually getting out of this is not necessarily anything about "octopus", but more like, Jack subconsciously assumes there's a "right" way to say things that will make no-one annoyed, but actually there isn't, and choosing the one most appropriate for the situation and accepting some people will be aggravated at you for being elitist/ignorant as inevitable is necessary, and it doesn't mean you did anything wrong, you just have to accept it.

Which is actually really really valuable and a lesson which sinks in slightly more each time I realise it... :)

[highlyeccentric]

There's certainly no Right Way with grammar! I am an ideological descriptivist and a practical prescriptivist (I'm an ESL teacher, prescriptivism is inevitable in that field), and capable of being either a structuralist or a poststructuralist linguist depending on the day.

Although I don't approve of systems of *talking* about grammar which don't account for common language roots. If your functional grammar of English does not make sense when defining, say, what a verb is, to someone who speaks French or German, you have failed to understand the concept of Indo-European languages. Or you are a professional troll, which in the case of one elderly scholar of my acquaintance, is probably the case.