What about the Chesapeake Bay? It’s considered brackish up to around Baltimore. It has Rockfish (Striped Bass) that can be 4 feet long and 50 lbs at maturity with some bigger.
I could have been more specific, yes they have the Na+/K±ATPase type sodium pump. But they are “osmoconformers” but the term was way down there in my memory banks and I couldn’t even find it randomly googling until now.
And zebra mussels. Octopedians eat mussels, don’t they?
And I, for one, welcome our new 8-legged overlords.
An octopi is 25.1327412287183459077011470662…
Which is irrational. The definition of a mouse is 1. a rodent 2. a thing resembling said rodent. Being exactly the same word (but with subtly different applications), the plurals are formed the same.
So is pi, therefore the plural octopi must be correct.
Regards,
Shodan
While I don’t agree with DrDeth that “mouses” is gaining acceptance for the computer application, there’s no reason the same word can’t use different plurals depending on context. For example, from bibliophage’s report linked to above:
[QUOTE=jtur88]
Being exactly the same word (but with subtly different applications),
[/QUOTE]
I wouldn’t say that a real mouse is only subtly different from a computer mouse.
Well, he actually said that it was gaining acceptance for the rodent application. In the mid-80s to the mid-90s, or so, it seemed to me that there was a healthy acceptance for the word “mouses” as a plural of “mouse” when it came to the computer device. But now, I seem to almost exclusively hear “mice.”
American Heritage Dictionary does list mouses as a plural for the computer device, but not for the rodent.
And here’s a cite from the mid-90s that seems to jibe with my memory of “mouses” having some acceptance in the 80s and 90s (including in Wired’s style guide.)
It’s something I happen to notice, as instinctively, I want to use “mouses” for the plural of the computer device, and I notice when people say “mice.”
I hate those meeces to pieces!
With pi no doubt being the plural of pus.
The thing with plurals, if one wants simple and easy to understand, one uses octopuses, by standard English rules.
Octopus can be used, but most people seek a word form to explicitly delineate plural over singular.
If one is a stuffy boring old pedant, one will use the correct Latin plural for the original Greek word (English abducted the Greek word and Latinized it, because scientific words used Latin), and thus insist upon octopodes.
If one uses octopi, then one is merely trying to sound like a stuffy boring old pedant, and being bad at it.
Thus, on the scale of respectable* uses, it runs octopuses > octopodes > octopi.
*By my standard. YMMV.
Unfortunately, “simple and easy to understand” have almost nothing to do with how languages develop.
Regardii,
Shodan
Hail Hydra!
Well, it’s actually quite simple. There is a great example here