aside: me after reading the headline: Shouldn't that be Octopii?
But no!
"The plural form octopii is doubly incorrect. Firstly, octopus derives from Greek, not Latin; its etymologically-consistent plural form is octopodes. Secondly, even if octopus were a second-declension Latin noun, the plural form would be octopi; in the correct plurals radii and gladii, with which octopii is analogous, the first ‘i’s are part of the words’ stems (radi- and gladi-), and not their case endings — for octopii to be the plural, *octopius would need to be the singular."
While I'm all for a history lesson (and the double-I octopii is indeed simply incorrect) I take issue with anyone insisting that "octopi" is wrong:
1. Language is neither static nor a series of rules to be blindly followed. The way a word was pluralized 1400 years ago has limited relevance today.
2. As noted just about everywhere, "octopodes" looks insane in any modern English sentence because we don't pluralize any other word that way. It also moves the emphasis to the second syllable. Thus it manages to make everybody's life harder for no benefit, a favorite pastime of the sort of people who would suggest this pluralization.
3. "Octopuses" feels stilted, and while it is correct, I thoroughly empathize with anyone uninterested in using a four-syllable word with three consecutive unstressed syllables in a sentence. Therefore it makes sense to create a shorter pluralization, and we can do this by analogy to other English words!
3a. We are not speaking Latin. If "-us" to "-i" is a valid pluralization of other English words, then it makes sense for it to be a valid pluralization of this word. While this pattern can be used irresponsibly ("bus" -> "bi"), using it for the three-syllable "octopus" is non-destructive. It preserves the structure (and the meter!) and thus makes a lot of sense.
4. To come back to "double-I octopii is simply incorrect": It's wrong because it's trying to be pedantic but uses the rules wrong (as noted in the wikipedia reference above). If, in 700 years, I were still alive, English were still spoken, and some band of idiots had managed to make "octopii" the most common pluralization, then I would begrudgingly accept it per point 1 above, but until then, no.
The best plural is simply keeping the word the same as the singular. I.e. "octopus". There are many animals using this form, e.g. fish, deer, elk, salmon, buffalo.
E.g. Look at all those octopus.
All the divers I know say it this way, easy to say, understand, doesn't make you sound like an asshole.
It raises the question - begging the question is something else.
As for the question, it probably has to do with the gender of the noun. I bet 'deer' derives from a neuter-gendered word in Anglo-Saxon, while 'bird' does not.
Noun gender is the system used by many languages to categorize words that have different declension rules. It's atrophied in English, but is implicitly still present in the various "inconsistencies" that pop up.
Note that those are animal we generally hunt/eat. I'd bet this is tied to the language of the ruling/hunting classes of England, back when they spoke French more than English.
There are also some middle-ground words like "Shark". One goes fishing for "shark" like they would "fish" but it is more common to say "several sharks" using a plural as opposed to "several fish" using the singular. But "fishes" is still a word, which likely goes back to ruling classes who ate fish but generally did not hunt them as they would have deer.
"Fishes" is a plural of a plural. You wouldn't likely say "two fishes", but you might say "all the fishes in the sea", referring to many groups of fish (much as you might refer to the "peoples of the world" referring to many cultures). Aside from that, I bet you're onto something.
I think it was done just to make it harder for those languages that do not have a concept of plural. Of course I'm kidding, but it has to be super frustrating trying to learn it as ESL.
> Language is neither static nor a series of rules to be blindly followed.
It's also not open to arbitrary subjective opinion. There are rules, this is not 'Nam. :)
Languages evolve, but you can't just claim something is correct because you think so or you'd love it to be so. It's incorrect in English language, today. Maybe in the future, when more people start using the plural "octopi", it will be correct.
> It's also not open to arbitrary subjective opinion. There are rules
> Conversations follow rules of etiquette because conversations are social interactions, and therefore depend on social convention. Specific rules for conversation arise from the cooperative principle. Failure to adhere to these rules causes the conversation to deteriorate or eventually to end. Contributions to a conversation are responses to what has previously been said.
Both parties must agree on those rules. There is no mandate that one must follow another's rules, in the initial engagement. This is helpful to understand, in modern online discourse. If someone doesn't want to play by some basic rules, further engagement is likely futile and unproductive.
This is a strange argument to make against "octopuses". Break from our history; use the English standard; we are not speaking Latin ... therefore it should be octopi!? What? How about this: it's OK to use the traditional form if it's still commonly understood, but otherwise let's try to use a "standard English" form. Those are your choices: traditional for the word, or standard. Since "octopodes" is awkward and not really ever used, we say "octopuses". Why would you convert to a false-traditional version?
Which implies that while the whole of ‘Australia and New Zealand’ can be referred to as ‘the antipodes’, Australia or New Zealand alone should be called ‘an antipus’.
But octopi is also trying to be pedantically latin, octopodes though it could be pedantic is at least correct, and entirely descriptive. In practice I wouldn't expect someone to say octopi to my face, but writing weird words online is another matter.
3. “Octopuses” sounds like what a child or English as Second Language speaker would say. Not sure what is stilted about being a novice to the language.
And a child or ESL speaker will often use constructions that sound stilted. I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.
"Stilted" is a bit of a judgy word, but it's not a value judgment of anyone else's intelligence. Some English speech sounds stilted. So it goes. That's why I don't prefer that pluralization in my own speech.
Lord knows I sound weird enough at times; I'm not here to throw stones from glass houses.
Technically speaking, Octopuses don't have tentacles at all. Those are arms. The morphology of "Octopus" is actually a really great example case for demonstrating paraconsistent logic.
It goes deeper than that! According to wikipedia, the tentacles, or appendages, are indeed called "arms", but they evolved from what in other molluscs is called a "foot"!
But more generally, enough generations have passed that "octopus" is no longer a foreign word, it's now just part of the English lexicon, and so you're free to pluralize it in the standard English manner. "Octopuses" is correct by that reasoning.
Note that this is the same process that we eventually apply to every other loanword; next time you talk to a German, watch them cringe at "delicatessens" as the plural to "delicatessen".
It's loan words all the way down. We just don't have enough info about prehistory to complete the chain all the way back to local variants of caveman speak.
I wonder why it is that "octopuses" just kind of sounds wrong?
Is it the repeated "s" at the end? But we have no problem saying "buses" or "rebuses".
Is it something to do with the plural of "fish" just being "fish"? But we have no problem making whales and dolphins plural with an -s.
Is it that "-puses" sounds slightly vulgar, like we're talking about multiple female genitalia?
I genuinely don't know. All I know is that "octopuses" just sounds wrong for some reason I can't put my finger on. And that "octopii" somehow "feels" much better, even if everything about it is logically wrong.
I'll still say "octopuses", but I know I always want to say "octopii" instead. (And spell it that way too, because "octopi" feels like it would rhyme with "canopy".)
Because it turns it into a four-syllable word with three consecutive unstressed syllables. It has bad meter and ruins the meter of almost any sentence constructed around it.
I hadn’t thought about that, but that explanation suits me as to why “octopuses” comes off… I don’t know, muddy?… while the 1983 James Bond film named for the vulgar pun rolls off the tongue, even though they use virtually the same phonemes: it’s that the latter emphasizes the third syllable, making it metrical again.
Thank you for a nifty insight, whose effects I’d noticed but whose mechanism had never occurred to me before today!
But "teleporters" or "marathoners" or tons of other words follow the same pattern of stress and sound fine. "Photocopiers" extends it to four unstressed syllables and sounds fine.
We treat words like they have a single stressed syllable and everything else is unstressed, and that's a useful abstraction sometimes, but that's not actually true. "Photocopiers" has primary stress on the first syllable but secondary on the third - PHO-to-CO-pi-ers. The same goes for "teleporters" and "marathoners".
But that also goes for "octopuses", so what gives? Seems like there's something else going on that my brain hasn't accounted for yet. It's probably that the plosives (stop consonants) are hugely unbalanced, with all of them coming in the first half of the word. Plosives, as the word implies, can add quite a bit of oomph to a word, even if they aren't reflected in the stress pattern. So "octopuses" seems to just peter out halfway through the word.
The pronunciation of the word is already on the boundaries between "awk-toe-poos", "awk-tuh-puhs", and "awk-tah-piss" depending on your region just in America.
So adding an additional "-es" that can be "-ehhs" or "-iz" gives at least six possible pronunciations.
> I'll still say "octopuses", but I know I always want to say "octopii" instead. (And spell it that way too, because "octopi" feels like it would rhyme with "canopy".)
I’m sure I read a sci-fi novel some years back where one of the main characters selectively breeds octopuses for intelligence before dropping them on a terraformed planet and there was a small bit about how he didn’t like octopuses either and so called them octopii.
I think what you cited missed the spelling aberration, since the -pus is a mistake, as it should have been -pous,-podes (singular,plural, nominative). the word is just a chimera.
also, the reality is
#define octopi octopodes
#define octopuses octopodes
and so on is what's more or less going on...whereas in English octopodes is a mouthful.
So the plural of virus, if it wouldn't have been viruses, would be viri, not virii? I think for octopus I'd have intuitively thought octopi, but for virus I'd have thought virii.
> The nominal mode enables motion through the water at 3.6 km/h, and for speed-seekers, the SEABIKE can reach a maximum of 7.9 km/h – much faster than normal swimming speeds or even flipper-assisted swimming.
Main difference is recruiting much larger muscles, so at some point most humans will be faster over a longer period with the widget. Let Phelps train with this for a couple months and he'd be faster. Although probably sad, because he likes swimming.
Actually I think you are making a slightly different observation about acceleration. We were talking about top-end speed, not acceleration from a standstill.
Not really. Most serious lap swimmers can do a kilometer every 20 minutes sustainably, akin to a marathon runner's pace (Sprint pace would be 100m/minute, with 50m/minute being what you would see in the fast lane of most recreational pools). So 3.6 kph isn't all that different, maybe a little faster than average but I assume they were also using a better-than-average bicycle person when doing the test.
There real advantage here is that you can use leg muscle. Distance swimming is all about upper body muscles, with legs being the afterburners only really used for sprinting. This machine would invert that arrangement.
Nope. He would be horrible with this device. That would be like asking a champion sprinter to compete in a wheelchair race. He would be using totally different muscles, legs rather than arms, and get schooled by most everyone with a longer history. A champion bicycle rider would do better on this contraption than any champion swimmer.
(Due to water's density, champion speed swimming is also 80% technique and body shape rather than muscle/cardio. So until the technique is developed, nobody would be "good" with this thing.)
It has been a while since I was a competitive swimmer (AAA+) but imho five minutes is a very good time for 500m. That would be faster than 95% of master swimmers at such distances, and well into the 0.01% of humans overall.
Ah shit your right, I had in mind 500 (yard) Free. 500 meters in under five is very good, but still attainable by the upper tier of highschool swimmers I think. I could reliably do 500 yards in under five and was a "B relay" tier on my team.
A couple things. 500m is not actually an event. The event is 400 meters, which is roughly 500 yards. And a yard pool will only be 25 yards, not 50. So yard times are "short course" and not really valid for serious competition. A 25-meter/yard pool has fewer turns making them faster, much faster in breaststroke. And a 500-yard in a 250meter pool will include one extra lap, one extra turn, than a 400m in a 25-meter pool. Short-course/yard times all seem faster than they really should be, regardless of distance conversions.
This isn't a topic I know about, but wouldn't a 25-meter pool have more turns? But if that's a typo I can't see why stopping and turning would be a good thing?
Meters are longer than yards, by about 8%. So 500yards is loosely about the same distance as 400 meters. But 500yards divides into ten 50-yards laps, or 20 lengths of the pool. With the dive and the finish, that is 19 turns. At each turn they push off the wall and for a few seconds move much faster than when swimming in open water and a greater percentage of time underwater (which is faster). And the swimmers center of gravity doesn't get as close to the wall during a turn, effectively shortening the distance actually swam on every lap ending in a turn. But a 400-meter race in a 25-meter pool (roughly the same distance as 500 yards) has only 8 laps or 16-lengths. It has only 15 turns, meaning four fewer accelerations off the wall and less time underwater. All of these effects change based on the stroke, speed and even size of the swimmers. So there is no good direct comparison between yard and meter pools.
And then an olympic pool is 50 meters long, meaning far fewer turns for a given distance. So "long course" times are generally slower than short course even at the same distance.
(Underwater is so much faster that swimming has rules about how far you can travel underwater during each length.)
This is besides the point but a 20 minute mile is a typical walking pace, not anywhere near a mid tier marathon pace (regardless of the definition of mid tier). That would be an 8:40 marathon.
I meant the effort required for the pace, not the literal speed. For a skilled swimmer, 20min per km can be maintained for a few hours, like a runner maintains marathon pace for a few hours.
Given that he optimized his training for swimming and not cycling I think he might do better with fins. His top speed of 7.2 - 9.6 km/h is freestyling without fins. He reached somewhere around 13 km/h using a Lunocet monofin.
Asimov had a humorous style of writing. Of course when he wrote "there is very little that is new to me" he was aware of how arrogant that sounded; he's playing this for laughs. He could also be quite self-deprecating.
Possibly naive, but hopefully trying to reason from first principles:
The insurance companies are the ones paying for care. The hospital systems are the ones charging for care. The entity that pays for care has every incentive to keep costs _low_. The entity that charges for care has every incentive to charge as much as possible. i.e. The ire of consumers should be directed at hospital systems rather than insurance companies.
IIRC, insurance companies benefit from high prices, as it benefits their gross profits. I forget whether that was due to regulations sort of capping profit margins, or what the reason was. I’ll see if I can track down a reference.
It's only in the interests of health insurance companies to make costs lower if they do it in a way that doesn't make costs lower for other insurance companies. As long as costs are high for everyone they can charge more knowing the competitors cannot undercut them.
In fact it's often in the insurance companies interests to make premiums generally go up, because they make more actual money for taking the same percentage.
That is the way it used to be. For many of us in high deductible plans, we pay thousands of dollars each year for care before the insurance company pays for anything. Not to mention the thousands of dollars we pay each year in premiums to the insurance company.
I didn’t knew that either, and there’s nothing embarrassing about it: pretty much every CLI tool that doesn’t have a clear name is an acronym (grep, cd, pwd, dd, yacc, etc).
Ping was originally named after sonar pings. Then later some guy came up with a weird acronym for a thing he did not invent. We don’t have to acknowledge it as a legitimate acronym. And as far as I can tell, the backronym is not a part of ping man pages, unlike with dig
The history of Stakhanov's feat, however, tells a somewhat different story. The push for a record on the night of Aug. 30 was, in fact, carefully planned and prepared by the Communist Party organization of the Tsentralnaya-Irmino mine in the Donets basin.
The mines, short of skilled workers and machinery, were failing to produce their quotas of coal. The party tapped Stakhanov, a little-educated, hard-working peasant-turned-miner, to set a record that would become an inspiration and example.
Konstantin G. Petrov, the chief of the mine's party organization, recalled that Stakhanov's wife strenuously resisted his attempt to make her husband a hero until she was silenced with the gift of a cow.
To increase Stakhanov's chances, the pattern of work was changed to free him from his usual task of shoring up the tunnel as he dug into the seam. Instead, two timberers followed after him, and Mr. Petrov himself held a light to the coal-face.
What Stakhanov did, to be sure, was still impressive, especially with the unreliable jackhammers of those days. Contemporaries described the big miner wrestling his hammer for hours, coal dust choking his throat and nose and grinding between his teeth.
''I suppose Stakhanov need not have been the first,'' said Mr. Petrov in an interview several years ago. ''It could have been anybody else. In the final analysis it was not the individual face-worker who determined whether the attempt to break the record would succeed, but the new system of coal extraction.
But no! "The plural form octopii is doubly incorrect. Firstly, octopus derives from Greek, not Latin; its etymologically-consistent plural form is octopodes. Secondly, even if octopus were a second-declension Latin noun, the plural form would be octopi; in the correct plurals radii and gladii, with which octopii is analogous, the first ‘i’s are part of the words’ stems (radi- and gladi-), and not their case endings — for octopii to be the plural, *octopius would need to be the singular."
Thanks wikipedia.
TIL!
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