Octopuses vs. Priuses

I was honored last year to write a piece for one of my all-time favorite websites, Visual Thesaurus, about my struggle to correctly pluralize the word "octopus." Bottom line: the word does not become octopi, it becomes octopuses, and I will forever feel like an ignoramus (which, b/t/w, does not become ignorami) for thinking otherwise.

The subject of phony-baloney Latinate plurals is in the news because of Toyota's well-publicized search for the correct term to multiply the Prius. Neal Whitman of Literal-Minded runs it down; the bottom line this time is that the technically correct answer would be priora, but the real answer is boring old Priuses.

In other word-nerd news, I was fascinated to learn that Chinese is well-suited to punning because of the limited number of sounds: "There are only 400-some syllables in the first place, which can be intoned in four or five ways each, at a maximum."

Quick postscript to this quick post: Thank you to all the machine-brain spam-robots who responded to my recent post, incisively proving my point about how most commenters on blogs are machine-brain spam-robots.