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A comment on Male octopus injects female with venom during sex to avoid being eaten. Parent comment

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.
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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.

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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?
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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.
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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.

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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.

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