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]

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.