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

[jack]

I think we had this conversation before, and you reckoned "walri" was fun, but I wasn't supposed to deploy "leviatha" as a burst-weapon against pedants. Where exactly is the line drawn? :)

[pseudomonas]

What were you basing the an → a on?

[jack]

I was going to joke "whatever annoys other pedants the most", but OK, I think I'm just being indefensible here :)

More seriously, I think the literal answer to why my brain did that is "leviathan and leviathon sound pretty much the same to me, and my brain generated a plural based on the sound, not the spelling". Not that "why" means it's correct :)

[seekingferret]

levyatanim

[jack]

:)

[seekingferret]

China Mieville uses the plural 'shadchans' in Kraken and I found it really wrongfooting.

[(Anonymous)]

I thought there was only one Leviathan.

[jack]

Bzzzzt! Then you were wrong. There's either no leviathans, or lots (depending if you think they're a mythological creature, or whales).

If you mean "there's only one of it, so people never need to use the plural grammatical form", then you are ALSO wrong, forgetting statements like "Monotheists don't believe in multiple Gods".

[(Anonymous)]

Pretty sure there's only one, actually. We're talking about the same Leviathan, right? Giant monstrous sea-serpent, famously difficult to draw out with a hook?

Yep, if it's that one, then there's only the one of it. That was the whole point of why Hobbes chose the name to indicate the need for a single sovereign authority, as of course everyone knows.

[jack]

Actually, I don't know anything about it at all, other than it was mentioned in the bible, and by Hobbes...? Can you tell me?

[(Anonymous)]

You might as well ask 'What's the plural of Grendel?', or 'is it Medusas or Medusae?', for all the sense pluralising 'Leviathan' makes.

[jack]

There are thousands of hits for "two grendels" on google. I agree you people can use what plural they like, but they indisputably DO use a plural ;)