Weird pupils let octopuses see their colorful gardens

When I first saw this headline I thought it was talking about weird school kids, and I was definitely intrigued. What it was actually about was interesting, but not as interesting as an article about freaky kids luring octopuses into their gardens would have been. But I still like the headline.

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Posted By: Alex - Sat Jul 09, 2016
Category: Journalism | Science

Comments

Sorry, but I'm not impressed, since these folks from Berzerkeley and Hahrvard don't know that the Latin plural of this mollusk's name, 'octopi,' is way easier to say.

Posted by Virtual on 07/09/16 at 02:23 PM

Octopus doesn't have a Latin plural - it's Greek. Okto-pous, eight-foot. And the Romans were snobby about knowing Greek, to them the language of natural philosophy and all things intellectual, so they'd never have sullied the word with a fake Latin plural - they'd have used the "proper" Greek one. Apparently that proper classical Greek plural would be octopodes, but nobody uses that (and I'll leave it to Expat to provide the modern Greek). In English, octopuses is correct; octopodes is over-correct; *octopi is simply unhistoric and wrong.

Anyway, surely everyone knows that the proper plural of octopus is hexadecapus?

Posted by Richard Bos on 07/13/16 at 07:59 AM

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