2y ago

A cool guide about fish plural

21 comments

Objection!
You can use fishes for multiple species however it is not required. You can use fish for a collection of trout and bass
- Now do email!
Does any other plural work this way? Or is this just another stupid ass English variation?
- Person/People does. The word "peoples" can be used as multiple different groups of people.
  For instance you can say to "the peoples of Europe" to refer to Germans, French, Italian, etc.
  
  interesting. so it's like a plural or a plural. so I can say the monkeyses of the Amazon.
  
  But people is a non-countable word, like water. You don't have one people, two people.
  When talking about peoples of [place] it's a countable word.
  Fish is countable.
- Monies
  https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/monies
  
  Hmmm. I'm just going to keep using this to refer to all my I'll gotten gains.
Of course anyone who hears this is likely to just think you're an idiot.
If there's more than 1 species of sheep, can I say sheeps?
- Sheepses
  
  Chill, Gollum
I get eaten by the worms... and weird fishes...
It's a good thing that English isn't actually defined by any one person or entity, and simply by its usage. That means this is bullshit.
- As you say in your first sentence, language is by consensus. And, the long-standing consensus among ichthyologists is to use exactly this terminology, and you'll find it consistently across the scientific literature for generations now.
I don't care if the person is technically correct or not, any time I hear 'fishes' I cringe.
- "He fishes in the lake" is a perfectly normal sentence.
  
  A bit disingenuous since it's from an obviously different context.

21 comments