idk I just love how we Young People Today use ~improper~ punctuation/grammar in actually really defined ways to express tone without having to explicitly state tone like that’s just really fucking cool, like
no = “No,” she said.
no. = "No,” she said sharply.
No = “No,” she
stated
firmly.
No. = “No,” she snapped.
NO = “No!” she shouted.
noooooo = “No,” she moaned.
no~ = “No,” she said with a drawn-out sing-song.
~no~ = “No,” she drawled sarcastically.
NOOOOO = “No!” she screamed dramatically.
no?! = “No,” she said incredulously.
I’ve been calling this “typographical nuance” and I have a few more to add:
*no* = “No,” she said emphatically.
*nopes on out of here* = “No,” she said of herself in the third person, with a touch of humorous emphasis.
~*~noooo~*~ = “No,” she moaned in stylized pseudo-desperation.
#no = “No,” she added as a side comment.
“no” = “No,” she scare-quoted.
wtf are you kidding no = “No,” she said flatly. “And I can’t believe I have to say this.”
no no No No NO NO NO NO = "No,” she repeated over and over again, growing louder and more emphatic.
nooOOOO = “No,” she said, starting out quietly and turning into a scream.
*no = “Oops, I meant ‘no,’” she corrected, “Sorry for the typo in my previous message.”
I cannot express how strongly I absolutely love language and writing and communication but if anyone asks why I will be showing them this post from now on
this is great, but I got to “no no No No NO NO NO NO” and immediately started singing “mamma mia, mamma mia, mamma mia let me go”
no no no nO (no no no)= “No,” she said, sticking to the status quo
nuuuuuuuuu= “Oh no,” she said sympathetically, trying to stifle her laughter
Anyone else wanna make a conlang with as little standardized spelling as medieval English. Like you just spell things however feels right
People keep adding “lol that’s how french is” to this when France has one of the most rigorously controlled language standardization systems around. They’ve got the Académie française over there frantically trying to make up new French words for stuff like walkman and email to prevent English loanwords from entering common parlance.
I’m not just talking about spelling being disconnected from pronunciation, English is already knee deep in that. I’m tualkng abaut efferee worde beying spelt diferent eich tyme. Absoulut wyrd anarchie. Daythe to perskriptivizm, aul puhwer too thee piepull
Spelle itt howe yoo lyke, but god it shoor isse a fite agnst the autocorrekt
any noun can become a verb if you don’t care enough
This point is invalid unless you use an example in your sentence
I CAN SENTENCE HOW I WANT THANK
BEAUTIFUL
you see thats why i love english
I like to
velociraptor around my house at 2 in the morning.
GOOD
My headache makes me want to clothesline into a wall
why do these make some semblance of sense 😨
Because brains don’t brain logically
Brains do brain logically! But when english doesn’t logic englishly, brain brains by itself to logic that english !
any noun can be a verb if you ungiveashit enough
(and we need a word coined to mean chaotic apathy as an active, rather than passive, connotations. don’t-give-a-fuck as a reason TO do things, as opposed to a reason to not do things.)
if you’re american and coming to australia, I’m gonna go ahead and say that you should be 100 percent way more worried about being king hit by a dude named “dane” in a bintang singlet than any fucking spiders that exist here
what does this say in english
“Good sir, if you are a resident of the United States of America and coming to visit the sunny land of Australia, allow me to inform you that you should be rather more concerned about being sucker punched by a gentleman named ‘Dane’ who is likely to be seen wearing a wifebeater with a beer company logo on it than by any of the dangerous spiders that exist on this lovely continent”.
ok so what does it say in american
“You’re more likely to get sucker punched/cold-cocked by an asshole than you are to be bitten by a spider”.
thank you
Well rattle my spoons, that don’t make a lick of sense. Wot in tarnation does this hootenanny say?
“If ya mosey on by Australia, you best be fixin’ to get to some fisticuffs more’n checkin fer spiders.”
This is a Rosetta Stone for a single language
Welcome to English.
Where even English speakers don’t always know what another English speaker said.
the big mans a lad i have fuck all, he lets me have a kip in a field he showed me a pond
I think my favorite part is how the first three are totally comprehensible to a modern reader, and then the fourth one is just “Wait, what?” You can practically see where William the Conqueror came crashing into linguistic history like the Kool-Aid Man, hollering about French grammar and the letter Q.
Full Disclosure, I’ve failed English Three Times and I’m mostly publishing this ask so someone more qualified can answer but:
I think Octopus is greek, like Oedipus. Octopi would be the latin-style pluralization, and incorrect. Octopodes is correct but not commonly used, Octopuses is also correct and more commonly used.
Your Best Bet, I think is to email your teacher and ask how to sort out the problem of picking the right plural so you have the tools to do it right in the future. Which will 1. give you the right plural, 2. emage with your teacher in a way that makes you look really good and 3. let you pick the right plural again in the future!
Octopus is a modern English word put together from Greek roots. The plural of the Greek -pus (foot) is indeed -podes, so if you’re being excruciatingly pedantic (as I almost always am), it is Etymologically Correct. It’s also the last of the three plurals to appear in English. 😛
Octopuses is a perfectly correct English plural form of an English word.
Octopi is an abomination, a Latin plural ending on a Greek stem, but by the rules of descriptivism, is also correct English, because it is very commonly used.
So yeah, ask your teacher which one they want you to use (not which one is right, which one they prefer).
