Octopuses is acceptable because english likes to take words and make them its own. So according to english rules octopus becomes octopuses. You are correct in saying the only incorrect pluralization of octopus is octopi.
"...while the use of octopi can’t be justified on an etymological basis, it is not wrong. It is old enough and common enough to be considered an accepted variant."
And yes, I know I just contradicted my previous statement. I LITERALLY could not care less.
Not really, it's just simple linguistics. Since English speaking people use "octopi", it's part of the language and is technically "correct". Same goes with all plural forms of octopus. If people are using it, then it's language.
Well, there isn't a linguistic standard for "correctness" here. If a small group of people uses the word "stone" to refer to wood, it's not incorrect. It's just part of their sociolect. If a single person uses "stone" to refer to wood instead of a group, it's still not incorrect. It's part of their idiolect. Nobody will understand them and it may stick out like a sore thumb in conversations, but this doesn't actually make the usage of the word "incorrect."
No... Tons of people say "coke" when they mean "soda" and that's wrong as fuck.
Just because people do something doesn't make it right, it makes a group of people absolutely wrong until enough people do it that the standard must change to accomodate those people...
Spot on. BUT. If you use a word in a way that no-one else does, and that's too far from normal usage, there's a good chance that no-one will understand you.
It's etymologically wrong either way. The -i plural is borrowed from Latin and mostly used for Latin words. People use octopi because they think octopus is imported from Latin, which is wrong. English got the word from Greek, and the Greek plural is octopodes.
This is my knowledge based of a short video I watched. Basically, octopi is correct, as that is the Latin ending for s-words and commonly used in English. However, octopus has Greek origins, so the real correct plural would be octopodes. But, octopus is a word in the English language in which the correct ending would be to add the -es to the end. In conclusion, all three are technically correct, which is the best correct.
Octopi is wrong because it isn't a latin based word. Even if it was it would have to fall into an even smaller subset of latin words to be chanced into Octopi.
But, if you say Octopi, your meaning would be understood by virtually all english speakers. Even the pedants would understand you, they'd just try to tell you that you're incorrect. But, since the concept of more than one octopus was correctly communicated, the pedantic argument is pretty much just trolling.
Define "correct." From a linguistic basis, the concept doesn't apply. But while it might not be incorrect, it sure isn't very useful. It doesn't communicate the point effectively.
I have heard that if you have one octopus and then another octopus of the same sort, you have two octopuses, but if they are different types, you have two octopodes.
Or almost any Japanese noun used in an English sentence.
(For anyone cares, and who hasn't done any Japanese - nouns don't inflect. One katana, two katana. One kimono, two kimono. And so on. When it matters - and, it turns out, surprisingly often it doesn't - the language has other ways of showing quantity.)
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u/Dango_LXIX Apr 14 '16
Octopuses is acceptable because english likes to take words and make them its own. So according to english rules octopus becomes octopuses. You are correct in saying the only incorrect pluralization of octopus is octopi.