Haven't seen anything pop up about these tweets from Christopher. It was mentioned something would be said about it from Handelabra's stream last night but I haven't seen anything more on this
Can you name that dinosaur? This is really the important thing.
I would think they are stegosaurus
Look like stegosaurs to me too.
I wasn't sure of the plural form so I just went with the singular name
So Christopher had a stack of stegosauruses in the store room?
Mr. Chomps has friends now!
Stegosauri?
A Steg Party. Very dubious.
That's not punny
Don't be saur about it.
I Dino what you're talking about.
I can't think of any dinosaur word jokes. Let me get my thesaurus.
Ugh, can we PLEASE just make this stupid pun thing go extinct already?
We can’t here. Last time, a meteor wiped them out. If we tried that here, they would be immune to damage.
One animal is a stegosaurus.
Two or more animals are also stegosaurus (common noun, no caps).
Refer to any one species of stegosaurus as a Stegosaurus.
Multiple species are Stegosauri.
(The same rule applies to octopus/Octopi or hippopotamus/Hippopotami.)
So for instance, if ten Black Bear and four Brown Bear live on a mountain, you can say "Fourteen bear live on the mountain" or "Two Bears live on the mountain".
Small correction: octopuses and hippopotamuses both derive from Greek and not Latin, so get -es endings instead of -i.
/pedant.
"Octopus" can also plural to "octopodes" :).
Regarding the dinosaur species, I believe the species name is "stegosaurus", while an individual of said species would be a "stegosaur", therefore the plural is "stegosaurs". I specifically looked this up when I was running a game of Hollow Earth Expedition (dinosaurs and stuff in the centre of the Earth in the 1930s) over on RPOL a while back so I'm pretty sure about that ;).
"Octopuses" is also correct.
jffdougan is right, "octopi" is absolutely not correct.
'Octopi' is frequently used in common parliance and provides no ambiguity to what is being referred to. Therefore, it is valid usage. There is no such thing as correct or incorrect usage - only usage the facilitates communication and usage that interferes with it.
(I apologize, but I was recently in a linguistics class, and some of the strong opinions of the class have rubbed off on me.)
That being said, I prefer the '-odes' ending, because it's the strangest and needs more love: Octopodes, Platypodes, Hippopotomodes, etc.
Also, 'Platypi' is always correct if you're baking them into a crust.
As a non-linguist but self-proclaimed word geek, I prefer if words don't lose aspects of themselves that help you determine their origin. "Octopi" makes you think the word is Latin, but it isn't, and that's confusing for someone who's interested in where words come from. I don't like words forgetting their roots.
My biggest complaint is not with wrongness itself though. It's with the fact that people who use "octopi" instead of the more usual "octopuses" seems to be doing it in a slightly pretentious "look at me, I know the correct plural form" kind of way (like those people who complain about "5 items or less" signs on checkouts). People doing that when they're actually right is kind of irritating. People doing that when they are only right because a lot of other people are also getting it wrong and everyone knows what they mean anyway, is infuriating.
if I used "octopi" in a Greek exam I'd get marked down for it, and rightly so.
"Octopussy" implies James Bond will be around.
Can’t we just chalk this up to language evolves and how you pronounce the plural version extinct animals or certain marine life doesn’t really matter.
Can we not just turn this into a bunch of nonsensical puns and non sequiturs already.
Where did Latin and Greek come from? If you can trace language back to its very first roots, you might have an argument for "correctness." Our words that come from Latin and Greek came from somewhere else first, but there's no advocacy for that Ur-language.
I manage to grin and bear it whenever I hear the word "ninjas" or "samurais". That kind of thing is annoying, but if people understand the intention and what's being said, it doesn't really matter much in the grand scheme of things.
Hmmm ... I understand that language can evolve, but I'm w/ Silverleaf on this one. If there's a known standard for something, I prefer saying things correctly.
See also "paninis", and "panini" used for a single sandwich. Petty, but it isn't hard to understand that panini is plural and panino singular, right?
It bugs me when people get stuff wrong too...just because "everybody does it" doesn't mean it's right. "Mediums" is one that I hear on telly sometimes, and there used to be this woman called...Doctor something-or-other (but she got her "doctorate" by just sending off for it or something) who did a "health" programme where she'd tell people off for eating junk and get them to crap in a box and inspect the contents to see how bad their diet was...yet she constantly referred to "all those little bacterias". Whaaat?! A so-called "doctor" who specialises in bodily stuff who doesn't know that "bacteria" is already a plural? Arrgh!
People who say stuff like "skellington" when they mean "skeleton" and "Pacific" when they mean "specific" bug me too. And people who say stuff like "would of" and "could of" when they mean "would've" and "could've". And people who use American spellings...even if they're American ;).
Yeah, I'm picky about that stuff. Shock horror :O.
Yinz' guys should be learned to talk right.
Me fail english? That’s unpossible!
They're vocabulistics is limited...
Gillian McKeith. Or, to give her full medical title, Gillian McKeith.
http://www.badscience.net/2007/02/ms-gillian-mckeith-banned-from-calling-herself-a-doctor/
Haha yes, that's her :D.
This whole plural business is why the English language is a wreck.
No, the English language is a wreck because it was formed by taking several other languages and smooshing them together. The plurals are a secondary issue.
'Smooshing' is a good word. I need to use it more often.
Well, it's a contributing factor but not the causation.
Not the original quote, but still. Enjoy!
I'm assuming the prescriptivists here still use the term "ax" instead of "ask" when it comes to axing a question.
I hear people say they want to "arks" a question sometimes. What.
What's the plural of smooshing then?
Smoosh is a verb surely. So it doesn't have a plural. To smoosh, smooshed. Wow. It IS fun to say. Smoosh.
It's right up there with "smock".
Smock smock smock
To the words, “I,” “am,” and “Groot,” and exclusively in that order?
As for the "prescriptivist" barb lobbed a few posts back...
One of the places where I work deals primarily with scoring the federally-mandated ESL tests given to pretty much everybody in ESL programs in public schools & some in private ones. As such, worrying about stuff like this is part of my bread & butter from October through early June.
That's fair. I'll assume that everyone is reacting that way due to employment and not just because of a pet peeve.
