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Re:Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoi... by mrlonglong on Sunday March 16, 2025 @10:36AM (#43379391)
The alien in the TV series the resident alien is descended from octopii.
Re:Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoi... by asveikau on Sunday March 16, 2025 @11:20AM (#43379726)
The plural of octopus is octopuses.

But if you want to sound more latin, octopus is a third declension noun, and those have nominative plurals that tend to end in -es, rather than the second declension which ends in -us for singular or -i for plural. Third declension nouns whose nominative form ends in -s also tend to change their root's final consonant when you change the suffix. (Eg. opus -> opera. That one doesn't end in -es because it's neuter.)

All this to say, the latin plural of octopus is octopodes.

Re:Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoi... by metalman on Sunday March 16, 2025 @11:41AM (#43379877)
VS, octapie, which is what the females are dreaming of, instead of getting envenomated

lively bunch, reclusive, come in all sizes, from extra tiny, to back off quick, and a whole other complex octapoid lifestyle

I regularly interact with spiders, wolf spiders bieng my favorites by far, sometimes called jumping spiders, they are sight hunters and dont build webs, and seem to stay in a certain teritory for days or weeks, before moving on

Re:Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoi... by AngryData on Sunday March 16, 2025 @01:34PM (#43380690)
Yeah sure but we don't speak latin, English is a hodgepodge of a dozen other languages, both dead and alive, and the only value that determines whether something is correct in english or not is common usage. And octopi is used often enough to not really be incorrect. You might as well be complaining that "ain't" isn't a word despite it clearly being so ever since Dickens used it.
Re:Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoi... by asveikau on Sunday March 16, 2025 @03:21PM (#43381421)
This is a specific case of trying to imitate the rules of Latin, incorrectly.

Another one that we misunderstand a lot is virus. It looks like the typical second declension thing ending in -us. It is actually a rare categorization of word, the 4th declension.

But it is a common occurrence in languages that when rules are complicated and confusing that they get generalized to simpler patterns from elsewhere in the language.

Romance languages have done that to Latin too! I gave an example of opera being the plural of opus. A lot of romance languages have reinterpreted neuter plurals as feminine singulars, because of that -a suffix.

Re:Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoi... by koakuma-chan on Sunday March 16, 2025 @02:15PM (#43380954)
What does ain't mean?
Re:Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoi... by mrlonglong on Sunday March 16, 2025 @04:54PM (#43382218)
Isn't. Ain't is UK.
Re:Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoi... by asveikau on Monday March 17, 2025 @02:29PM (#43391386)
Ain't is also common in the US, but is stigmatized.

In the US, it is regional to the east coast, both north and south. It is also common in African American speech.

Re:Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoi... by kennysoona on Sunday March 16, 2025 @05:30PM (#43382526)
> And octopi is used often enough to not really be incorrect.

By that logic irregardless is also not really incorrect.

Re:Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoi... by tricot on Monday March 17, 2025 @09:26AM (#43388363)
Why would he try to sound more latin when the word octopus does come from ancient greek? I think that's the cause for this common error. People assuming a word is latin just because it ends in '-us'.