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October 25, 2005

Cactuses; or, the Joys of Hypercorrection...

So there was a time when I was really into cactuses. Except, I always called them "cacti".

But that's right! I hear you saying.

Well, it turns out that it's not. Cacti is a big fat lie. Look it up if you don't believe me--the OED is on my side. And, it also turns out, equally false are commonly used plurals such as octopi, syllabi, platypi. Imposters! Fakes! All of them!

Personally, I was outraged--simply scandalized!--to learn that all of the deep conversations I've had over the years about cacti, octopi, and platypi (oh my!) have had the taint of bad grammar.

The idea of pluralizing words ending in "-us" with an "-i" comes from Latin, of course. The problem, though, is that this particular switching of suffixes only applies to a fraction of Latin words (those in the 2nd declension)--none of which, to the best of my knowledge, happen to refer to spiny plants, eight-legged sea creatures, or duck-billed wierdos. You can take comfort, however, in the knowledge that radius really does go to radii in its plural. So all of you math nerds are off the hook.

Anyway, apparently this practice of producing (spurious) Latinate plurals of words that really should just get the normal English "-es" is due to hypercorrection, the same phonemenon that causes people to say "blank and I" all of the time, even when it's the object of a sentence (when me should be used). (For example: "The cactus gave the syllabus to the platypus and I.")

Who cares? Only nerds like me apparently. If this actually is interesting to you I highly recommend the wikipedia article on Hypercorrection. While you're at it, check out the fäntästic ärticle ön heavy-metal umlauts.

Gööd tïmes.

Posted by edmond at October 25, 2005 09:24 PM

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