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

[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 :)