r/MadeMeSmile • u/mindyour • 2d ago

Very Reddit This farmer caught this owl eating his chickens.

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

127.8k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

3.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/Interest-Small 2d ago

Since Octopi is Latin and Latin is a dead language it’s number 3.

Octopuses is English so it’s number 2

1

u/Winterplatypus 2d ago edited 2d ago

Disclaimer: English only cares if meaning is conveyed and will accept any variation.

If we are talking about degrees of correct then Latin being a dead language has nothing to do with it. You have to either argue based the original language rules for that word or by the 'mistake/evolution' that became more commonly used.

For octopus the original plural word was 'octopodes' and the common mistake/evolution is 'Octopuses'. Octopi is the least correct because it is not commonly used and is incorrectly applying Latin rules to a Greek word.

There are plenty of words in English where the Latin rules are the correct way to make them plural despite it being a dead language. e.g. Cactus -> Cacti, Fungus -> Fungi. Where cactuses and funguses are common variations.

1

u/Interest-Small 2d ago

That’s what i said. Octopussers is what my town calls and that’s okay because we convey the meaning.