101–110 of 194 posts
It seems naive to assume they don't have communication (more frequent and more complex), even though we may not have noticed or been able to detect it.
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If someone at a party complained to me that octopuses is wrong and it should be octopi, I would most likely be moving on to the next table..
And I would happily jump in your vacant seat and enjoy hours of pedantic discussions on the vagaries of silly English words.
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I find Star Trek’s aliens so human-like that it ruins the whole thing for me. But Children of Ruin is so much better!
My head-canon for this has always been the universal translator also translated the physical appearance of beings so that you could read their body language. This explains why everyone looks like humans with a slightly different color and head shape. In some cases, like energy beings and giant slimes, it simply cannot translate anything and displays the original being. This head-canon melts in the face of the actual…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next...
Really cool, though a reminder(?) of how we don't give other life forms enough credit for their thinking ability. I looked out in my backyard the other week and saw two foxes playing together with my kids' volleyball they left in the yard. Like grasping it with mouth, tossing it, going to get it, wrestling each other. Amusing stuff.
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There’s no right way. Octopus is a word created in modern scientific latin by nonnative (scientific) speakers out of greek parts brought into English. There are no real rules there. It is not a loanword from Greek, it was meant to be a scientific latin origin word, but not native latin like other Latin words that have -us as endings for nouns. It’s a mess, there’s no answer, pluralize as you like but don’t go telling…
so then we are free to allow any convention to take hold. so why not use the multiple different potential pluralities to differentiate between same species, different species, and unknown species? I think the following would be the most intuitive! Octopuses seems most intuitive and already assumes unknown species (ie used by children who dont even know what a species is) Octopi sounds similar to a singular entity (no…
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I googled "cactodes" and this comment was the 7th result on the first page.
7th result on the first page? Sounds like an authoritative source to me!
"I'm glad there was no internet to record MY behavior when I was growing up!" --an old octopus, 11/10/2022
May I suggest a book to anybody that finds cephalopods interesting, especially given the connection with consciousness which is a recurring topic in these circles: Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness My only critique is that the plural spelling is octopuses and not octopi , just like the article. Octopuses just looks wrong and sounds funny, I stand my ground. Yes yes I know that i…
No, the plural is octopodes, just like cactus->cactodes, virus->virodes and surplus-surplodes (my favorite)
"virus" is a nonstandard Latin mass noun. It's neuter, but uses the 2nd declension masculine nominative, and being a mass noun it had no plural form in classical Latin. However if you wanted to give it a plural form, the grammatically correct plural would be "vira". This construction would be analogous to "fishes" or "waters" in English.
"surplus" comes to us via Old French, so its plural perhaps should be whatever plurals were in Old French. However it also originates in Latin as "superplus", which is the prefix "super" + the adjective "plus". The word "plus" itself is also irregular. Its masculine or feminine nominative plural is "plures", and its neuter nominative plural is "plura".
I admit that "superplodes" is pretty fun to say.