51–60 of 194 posts
For some reason, I imagined it would use its eight appendages and throw things like you see in a cartoon. Maybe I am watching too many cartoons. :-)
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…
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No, the plural is octopodes, just like cactus->cactodes, virus->virodes and surplus-surplodes (my favorite)
It may be a word like "fishes". I once saw "fishes" on an interpretive sign at an aquarium and some folks were mocking such and obvious grammatical error. Turns out, "fish" is the correct way to refer to multiple individual fish as a group, whereas "fishes" is the correct way to refer to multiple species of fish. I wonder if "octopi" might refer to multiple octopus without making any indication as to weather they are…
As far as the plural goes, it is just a weird corner of the language where there is no consensus on what the right word is. merriam-webster lists all three variants as plurals.
I'm reading Children of Ruin, that's how it starts.
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!
This head-canon melts in the face of the actual lore, but it helps me suspend disbelief.
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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…
As a counterpoint, The Atlantic ran an interesting article[0] yesterday suggesting that it's not really clear what the Octopuses' aims are when they do this, and that we do really like to anthropomorphize them. [0] - https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/11/gloomy-o...
What looks intentional to one observer may seem accidental to another. “A lot of animal-behavior analysts would look at the same sequence of behavior and give a different interpretation,”