For fucks sake!
It’s Penes or Penises! There’s something that pisses me off to the extreme about the half-educated who try and impose their half-understood or half-remembered classical grammar on common English words.
Be educated, or be common. I couldn’t give a fuck - but don’t be half-educated and superior with it.
That is all.
BritBoy
I can’t agree with you more. It’s like ‘octopi’. For heaven’s sake, just say octopuses!
One hippopotami
Cannot get on a bus
Because one hippopotami
Is two hippopotamus.
– Alan Sherman.
I’d rather say “eight vaginae”.
Do people actually use it because they think it’s correct? I’ve always assumed people say it (or write it, as the case may be) because they are trying to be humorous by using a goofy-sounding made-up word.
I might get behind a pitting of people who think they are succeeding in being humorous.
Yes, but octopi is a proper Latin pluralization. Penii is not. Using the word octopi may be pretentious, but at least it’s correct.
I know at least one person who thinks it’s correct. Teacher, never wrong, you know the type. She got very upset when I corrected her!
Nuh-uh. Octopus is a Greek word, not a Latin one. The correct classical plural would be octopodes.
In a related topic, I hate people who are all up in arms and picky and pretentious about proper pluralization of obscure words (like, say, zoonosis/zoonoses) and then go around saying ‘a bacteria’. I have to admit, I think that, with very few exceptions, once a word has been borrowed into English, we should pluralize it like an English word and forget the older pluralization.
Huh, how do you like them apples? The form is pervasive even within the marine biology community; if they don’t know the right word, I don’t know what to think anymore.
Grilled baby octopuses in a Greek pastry shell would make a lovely octopie.
Are baby octopuses octopussies?
Though were it Latin, the correct pluralization would be Octavius.
Think that marine biologists aren’t classical scholars. Of course, if they’re using it, it’s kinda hard to call it incorrect…
Of what? “Octopus” is not a second-declension Latin word. “Octopi” is not the proper plural of anything other than by having been a solecism granted popular approval by 100 years of usage. Or perhaps it’s appropriate to say that Greyhound and Trailways run interurban bi to nearly every major North American city.
If they were an Irish band, the would be the Octopogues.
*Current members
Shane MacGowan – 1982-1991, 2001-
Spider Stacy – 1982-1996, 2001-
Philip Chevron – 1985-1994, 2001-
James Fearnley – 1982-1993, 2001-
Terry Woods – 1986-1994, 2001-
Jem Finer – 1982 - 1996, 2001-
Andrew Ranken – 1982-1996, 2001-
Daryl Hunt – 1986-1996, 2001-*
You never know what kind of folks you’ll meet on Greyhound. Some of them may well be interurban bi.
Back to ii…anybody notice the prevalence online of the word virii for plural of virus? When I took Latin, -ii was the nom.pl. ending for 2d decl. words ending in -ius.
Example: “I have a virius on my penius.”
:eek:
:eek:
Good Lord, it would be like playing Russian Roulette!
Well, yeah, that’s one thing to do with them.
When I go to Greece and start speaking Greek, I’ll be more than happy to use Greek pluralization. When I’m in the US, and speaking English, octopus is an English word, and gets whatever pluralization English speakers have decided is most appropriate for it.
Exactly. And the ENGLISH pluralization is ‘octopuses’. Not the fake, incorrect, pretentious ‘octopi’.