It’s fine if you think that I’ve made a mistake in reading. Sure, I do that. But why in the world would I care to make up something to contradict you? Since I don’t believe I have ever used the word “penii” I wonder just what I would be getting angry about. I don’t remember ever having any sort of personal exchanges with you in the past.
So, no. I didn’t even notice the poster I was replying to in the first post (on this topic). When you came back angry, I was surprised. I’m still surprised.
This reply is probably a mistake, and since you’ve already decided I’m a liar, I don’t really know what I’m hoping to accomplish. Finger exercise, I guess.
That’s why I was puzzled. It doesn’t seem possible that you’ve actually seen “penii” used as a joke, at least not frequently. It simply doesn’t make sense as an actual joke, for all the reasons I outlined. That’s why it seemed to me that you were disagreeing with me just to be disagreeable. The snarky rejoinder at the end of your post wouldn’t have bothered me otherwise, but it seemed to confirm that impression in this case. The implication is that jokes must have been flying over my head - because I’m so humorless as to consider pluralization “no laughing matter”.
I can’t see your motivations, but your suggestion that people are using “penii” as a joke simply doesn’t make sense. It still doesn’t seem like a viable joke. It would have to be a joke playing off something, except that (in the absence of the widespread error I described) what could it possibly be playing off? And when your suggestion didn’t make sense, I had to wonder if you had some other motive. I was mightily puzzled as to why you would suggest that I’m humorless and start arguing with me just because I expressed irritation at a particular usage error. Sometimes people become defensive when, for whatever reason, they think their own language use is being criticized; that was my best guess.
If that’s not your motive, then my apologies. I still don’t see how it could possibly work as a joke, though.
The one part of that summary that I would disagree with is that I don’t think it’s really necessary to “establish rules” in the first place. (I’m going to work hard at coming up with a flimsy rationalization to reconcile that with my own irritation at seeing octopi and thesii.) Most languages don’t have anyone working to standardize usage; such things aren’t necessary because there are natural forces already present - namely, people’s need to be understood by others - that work to slow the divergence of languages. The force that unified Latin usage was not their educational system, but rather simply commerce between the far-flung parts of the Empire. And there’s no evidence that such rules even accomplish anything - after all, centuries of grammarians have clucked their tongues at “ain’t”, and it still ain’t disappeared.
Language works fine on its own; such rules are simply unnecessary - they don’t change most people’s speech, and even if they did, there’s nothing particularly superior about the ways that prescriptivists would have us talk anyway.
I haven’t seen “penii” used frequently at all, just a couple of dozen times total, which is why I said my exposure was limited. I am not sure if I’ve ever seen it here, though I won’t rule it out. I don’t read many of the sex threads. Maybe it only registers on me when I read it as being used tongue-in-cheek, or maybe at least some of the uses were by people I knew were using it jokingly.
Simple. If seeing these words irritates us, the thing to do is to convince others not to use them, in order for the language to remain esthetically pleasant to us. On the other hand, if they ever become standard usage, there’s nothing we can do about it.
That’s possible, although I think that Latin went through many changes before and during the time of the Roman Empire. And after the fall of the Western Empire, Vulgar Latin evolved into many Romance languages. The “Latin” What Exit? is speaking about is a language that has been artificially preserved by people for centuries. It’s a dead language, almost exclusively used in writing, and almost never in everyday life, which facilitates the task of keeping it unchanged.
Oh, and it appears that octopi has become a rather common usage. Many people use it, often not knowing where it comes from, and not claiming to know Greek or Latin, and some of the cites linked to say that it is not a recent word and might even predate octopuses. This doesn’t, however, mean that I or anyone else should have to use it.
Can anyone really say that when they have read “Octopi” that they could not grasp it’s meaning as a plural of Octopus? Thus, it is valid.
I use Octopi as I don’t want to sound like Daffy Duck*, not to mention not wanting to spray my audience with spittle. And yes, I do have a degree in Marine Biology thankyouverymuch.
and one can do an excellent DD imitation with that word, just like with one word- “antipasto” one can do an excellent Vincent Price.
I am going to add my praise for post #117, which is a masterly statement of the issue, and add one comment:
Prescriptivism has a valid place in linguistics, as the description of those usages permissible and impermissible in that subset of English called “correct English” by prescriptivists and “formal written English” by descriptivists. The avoidance of contractions, careful attention to pronoun case, avoidance of the “sentence adverb,” placement of a preposition before its object where informal usage might allow it to hang terminally: all these are characteristics of a particular form of English usage most often found in formal writing.
Not one whit: as Excalibre pointed out, dictionaries are only a guide to how a word has been used historically, not whether that usage was acceptable or not. Chambers, Penguin and the Shorter Oxford all include “octopi” as a plural of octopus, which merely means that it’s been used in error in the past.
Incidentally, Excalibre, I’m extremely friendly to the notion of dictionaries being documents rather than sets of rules: what I take exception to is the some of the usages that they document, not the documentation itself. I like arguing with the dictionary.
Then again, I like arguing with the weather forecast when it offers odds on the chance of rain, too.
Excalibre, the idea that certain words, e.g., nucleus, must be pluralized in a Latin form, and that folks who do not do so would be looked down on, is the point I was originally making. I say that I don’t think it ought to be considered wrong if folks pluralize according to normal English rules–e.g., saying “nucleuses” (or “nukuluses,” severus :D)–but that’s a bit of counterrevolutionary prescriptivism on my part, inasmuch as it’s not a usage I can see folks coming too naturally.
Folks know that certain words ending in -us must be pluralized by changing them to -i, and that if they do not do so, they’ll be making a mistake, to the extent that a person can be mistaken in such matters. When they decide to pluralize other -us words by changing them to -i, it’s not pretension at work: it’s a desire not to be seen as ignorant or stupid by other people.
Yeah, you’re prescribing a usage you happen to like. I was describing what I’ve seen to be common usage; I may be wrong about it - but I haven’t seen many examples of people using funguses or nucleuses, and I’m not sure why you think your particular uncommon usage is particularly privileged.
And if people were actually applying that logic, it would make a bit more sense to me. But your logic would require that the singular be penius, and the singular of thesii (to use the example I noted earlier) be thesius. So that’s obviously not the logic that people are applying, which is why I find it particularly incomprehensible.
Fine, drop that point. It was an aside. I surrender it.
I’m focusing on “octopi,” not the other examples you came up with later. You complained about people who go around “inventing fake Latin plurals for words,” and I was trying to explain that they do so out of a genuine belief that this is how they’re expected to pluralize words, not out of some sort of complicated theory of what second-declension Latin nouns looked like. They’re not trying to be pretentious or show off their Latin; they’re just trying to figure out the rules for English.
Yeah, I get where octopi comes from. That’s why I don’t hate the perpetrators of that word nearly as much as the ones behind penii and virii.
And you know what? If people don’t know, it’s not like it’s hard to find out. Especially when you’re composing some magnum opus on an internet forum. It’s called the goddamn internet, people. It’s a magical tool that puts all this information right at your fingertips! No, I’m not shitting you! You can find it quite easily on the internet!
Thank you. The burning rage inside of me has diminished.
And yes, I do have a degree in Marine Biology thankyouverymuch.