Hi, Felix.
Looked up a lot of strange and interesting trivia while reading up on octopi for this arc. Here's one: apparently octopis don't survive mating. Males die shortly afterward and females die shortly after the eggs hatch.
Hi, Felix.
Poor Todd and Andi both look about ready to cry, and everyone else is totally oblivious. You are wonderfully evil Dave to drag this out. There is going to be one of those ‘inappropriate outbursts’ at some point in this little demo that is going to get them all thrown out of the aquarium and indefinitely uninvited.
At least Selkie and Amanda are back to normal again. (Whether for more than the moment, we’ll see.)
And aren’t they GREAT sisters? (Not the ones to take care of but the ones to watch.)
Man, poor Todd looks like he’s about to cry. Trying to hold the “You told me she was DEAD!!” until at least the kids are out of earshot can’t be easy.
I’ll admit I’m not the greatest on “English, and how she are talked good” but shouldn’t that be “octopi such as he”?
No bones – all meat. Keep the good thoughts, Selkie. 😀
I’m not sure which is properly grammatically correct, but saying it out loud “octopi such as he” kind of hits my ear wrong.
you’re right, dave. ‘he’ is a subject pronoun, and ‘him’ is the corresponding object pronoun. in this case, octopi is the subject and felix is an object, so him is right. if it helps, ‘such as’ is synonymous with ‘like’ in this usage and ‘like he’ is clearly clangingly wrong.
No, anatman; at least when I was going to high school, there were such things as “predicate nominatives”. They occur mostly (actually only, as far as I know) in clauses whose verb is a copula (like “to be”) or is acting like a copula (like “seem” or “resemble”). So Alpo was right. — Another mistake: “octopi” is a barbarism because “octupus” is Greek instead of Latin. The educated plural is “octopada”. Any malacologist would know *that*, even if he knew nothing about predicate nominatives. But most English-speakers would rather say “octopuses” than “octopada”, even malacologists.
Plus, this guy’s a marine biologist, not a linguist. I would expect him to speak naturally, not correctly.
Then maybe he should know that the plural of octopus is octopodes.
Boy, I sure do love the plural war.
Or octopuses! Yeah, you can’t use the i to make things plural unless it’s a Latin derived word, and octo is Greek.
Played Kingdom of Loathing yet? (One box, many boxen, and that’s the tip of the iceberg.)
I hold with Octopodes.
Also, I grew up prescriptivist but over time became a descriptivist. For example, “I ain’t” is reasonable English, it’s just the kind of register you wouldn’t use in a research paper or during a job interview. “Nuke-u-ler” is a perfectly acceptable variant of “Nuclear.” “You guys” is gender-neutral (as it can refer to a group of girls), while various masculine terms that used to be passably gender-neutral no longer are.
If “silly” can change from “innocent” to “childishly ridiculous” then words such as “literally” and a few “-phobia”s can change meaning in much the same way, usage. Also, I used to let lie/lay be a pet peeve but really, lay is taking over and I don’t see any reason to be all fussy about it.
I have had fun training myself to use “y’all” even though it’s not part of my natural dialect 🙂
“Naturally” is “correctly”. People who think that what people say naturally is incorrect, and they should be saying something else (something non-natural), are called “prescriptivists”. “Prescriptivist” is a dirty word among linguists.
Same with “it’s me” instead of “it’s I”. So what.
I’d give the octopus 12:1 odds over Selkie or even one of the adults of her species.
Add in the fact that Sarnathi are freshwater organisms and the octopus is (almost certainly) in a saltwater tank…
Shit son. If I were Todd, I’d definitely step outside with Andi for a little face to face time. And by face time, I mean knock her out cold with my fist.
Ah, you mean face-to-fist time:)
Heh, pretty much.
I guess a headbutt might work…
Well, Todd’s reaction is rather in keeping with EXACTLY what I predicted it would be – too shell shocked to even properly respond. I’m sure he knows that he’ll have to arrange a face-to-face with Andi soon, but he first needs time to assimilate this – and I hope Dave is wise enough to realize the very popular show at the public aquarium full of Selkie’s classmates is definitely NOT the place or time to have an outburst.
I don’t know why I said Dave, I meant “I hope TODD is wise enough…”
People have been swapping up my name and Todd’s on multiple occasions lately. Makes me wonder.
“selkie, by todd smith, is the story of architect and single parent dave warren and his nonhuman adoptive daughter selkie.”
At least they’re not calling you “Selkie” 😛
Dave> I was wondering if perhaps it is properly “Marine Biologist” instead of “Oceanic Biologist”. Also, Octopi have been known to not only escape but go of the room, down the hall, and eventually die of a lack of water. They’re very good escape artists according to my professors:)
I love those escape stories. 😀
Read an article many years ago about an aquarium that had a lot of hard to replace tropical fish go missing. They were afraid of employee theft and smuggling expensive fish, so they set up cameras to catch the culprit in the act.
It turned out an octopus in one of their displays was opening the gate to it’s cage, crawling out and across the floor, opening the latch into other tanks, eating the occupants, then crawling back into it’s own tank, and closing and locking the latches behind it each time.
I’ve heard reasonable arguments that octopi are the smartest things on earth apart from large primates and cetatians. And notably, unlike every other really smart thing we know of, they’re invertibrates, so they’re *extremely* different from an evolutionary perspective; they’ve essentially evolved their intelligence completely independly of every other really smart critter, and additionally did so when no other invertibrate has managed much at all.
The unfortunate thing, from their perspective, is that they have an extremely short lifespan (maybe 4 years), and they have no “culture”—since they aren’t raised by parents like most mammals and aren’t social creatures, every octopus is essentially forced to start from scratch on the learning curve, and only has a few years in which to learn.
If they were longer-lived and had some culture with which to pass down what they had learned, they might well rival or surpass even the non-human primates.
I’ve heard that, in areas where the local octopus population has recently increased, there is a noticeable uptick in octopus cleverness (in the wild, mostly ability to steal from traps without themselves getting trapped). The theory is the first octopus to figure it out is more likely to be seen by others, who learn the trick.
Yup. I completely believe that.
What’s even cooler is that they house parts of their brains in their legs. To the extent that if a leg is severed it can still do brain-related things for a while. Imagine having your limbs work independently of your intentions… well, actually, this has happened IRL (humans with split brains, where their hands will “fight” over whether to get a piece of clothing out of the closet or put it back) and in a manga (Parasyte, if I recall, where an alien takes over this guy’s left hand).
Also, go read Freefall. Sam Starfall is a space squid, and his culture has derived from that. Two interesting parts are that their culture lauds trickery and theft (to stay alive), and that since parents die during the process of creating the next generation and since there’s so many born at once, there’s no family structure and most of the people don’t have any desire to have their own kids.
Can you imagine what would happen if the big octos became multi-generational? Able to pass down knowledge from the previous generations to the younger? Chaos.
In the version of this story that I heard, the octopus was also timing its excursions to avoid a patrolling security guard.
If Selkie picked a fight with that she would lose.
And the “invertebrate means it doesn’t have bones” thing is bugging me. I mean, I guess it’s true, but that’s not what it /means/.
Also, what Jade said about the Marine Biologist vs Oceanic Biologist thing.
Everything you say is true, to the best of my knowledge.
That said, it’s possible that this man is deliberately using incorrect language for the sake of his (mostly young) audience. Since the point of his presentation is not to teach the word ‘marine’ or precise definition of invertebrate, he may have chosen other words to be more easily understood without spending time on an explanation.
Yeah my thinking is that he’s going for the Layman’s Terms definition to avoid boring the crowd.
And Marine v Oceanic is something I meant to fix when Jade pointed it out, thanks for the reminder.
Oh anytime:) And if you need info on Dinosaurs, I’m yer gal:) I correct stuff in movies all the time LOL. I happen to know someone who has a degree in “Marine Biology” so I was curious if that was correct.
I was just flashing back to Seinfeld, myself.
Yeah, technically invertebrates are animals that “neither possess nor develop a vertebral column.”
Just looked it up at Merriam Webster – it seems “octopi” is actually considered correct meanwhile.
Nevertheless it hurts if you are well aware that it comes from the Greek okto-pous, eight-foot, and the scientifically correct plural is “octopodes”. If necessary, “octopuses” could be used too, although it sounds funny to me. But “octopi” definitively hurts. My fingers even itch when I bring myself to type that. – Anyway, “octopis” is just off.
“Correct” and “accurate” have never fussed me much. I’m partial to “octopoose.” 😉
So it’s like the plural of goose: octopeese
Octopoxen!
I am all in favor of this plural, and will try to remember to work it into my vocabulary alongside “octopodes.”
Bowen, of Octopoxen with moosen in the woodsen.
The reason that it gets rendered as octopi is because the English word ends in -us. When made plural, -us often gets changed to an -i.
The reason it gets rendered as octopi is because the LATIN plural for a word ending in -us is usually -i. Octopus, as mentioned above, derives from the GREEK for “eight feet” and consequently while using the Greek plural would make sense (the original language) and using the English plural would make sense (the language it’s in now), using the Latin plural makes no sense whatsoever.
It doesn’t fail to make sense, it just makes the same sort of sense as “Mommy goed to the store today.”
Our brains come with firmware designed to amass language without an original basis for comparison. We pick up on patterns and overlay them everywhere until the exceptions are explained to us. It makes total sense to do that with anything that looks Greek or Latin because a large amount of our vocabulary does come from those languages and very few people actually speak either Latin or one of the earlier Greek languages (be it Attic, Doric, Koine, or any of the others I don’t have straight in my head yet).
Also, because English is a hodge-podge of thefts from more languages than we can keep track of anymore. And we still insist on keeping spelling methods around that not only fail to indicate appropriate categories but actually falsely indicate existing categories that the word doesn’t even belong in (such as “margarine,” breaking the category of “g followed by a and o doesn’t soften”). Octopus was originally octopous and if it had stayed that way we wouldn’t be as likely to misclassify it.
There’s no reason to feel even the least bit awkward about getting these things wrong. The mental burden of memorizing individual word-forms in English is quite high, and it’s unreasonable to expect perfect memorization from all speakers of English.
See JBR’s Spelling Reform fantasy: http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ortho.html
I saw an episode of Octopussy (the James Bond movie) when I was little and always knew the plural of octopus was octopi, and it has never sounded unusual to my ears. Just like the plural of nucleus is nuclei, fungus is fungi, and cactus is cacti, there is nothing odd about this other -us word. There are more, but those are the ones that come readily to my mind. The exception to this rule are things like hippopotamuses being the plural of hippopotamus.
Actually, Selkie, the octopus has a very nasty beak, which is sometimes envenomed.
Do not attempt to eat an octopus, even a very small octopus, in one go.
People eat live octopodes IRL. There’s an incident on 1000 Ways to Die where the thing just decided to stop going down the throat, then held on and couldn’t go up or down so the guy choked to death.
♫ Dumb ways to die. ♪ ♫ ♪ So many dumb ways to die. ♫
“Standing by the fruit stall on the corner,
Once I heard a customer complain,
‘You never seem to show the fruit we all love so.’
That’s why business hasn’t been the same.
I don’t like your peaches.
They are full of stones.
But I like bananas,
Because they have no bones.
Bo-de-o-don’t give me tomatoes ,
Cant’ stand ice cream cones,
But I like bananas
Because they have no bones.”
To be fair, Amanda *does* have a point. And it appears Selkie’s fearsome scary carnivorism is really just a Selkie thing versus a species thing. Pohl, Sai Fen, and even Suko are happy to simply be observers and learn about the octopus versus fantasizing hunting it down and eating it. Wondering if they just are better mannered, it’s different personalities, or if it’s actually a case where Selkie may more to eat than she’s being fed.
Sarnothi are apex predators by nature. Selkie just probably never learned to live down her basic instincts.
Some of it might be “kid in the candy store”. Last time I looked, vegetables were a lot cheaper than meat. Being raised in an institution, where they have to feed many people, seems like there would be a lot more vegetables on the table than there would be meat. And since she HAS TO eat meat, she would get more than the other orphans, which, most likely, caused hard feelings. And I’m sure there was more dollar-a-pound chicken on the table, than there was ten-dollar-a-pound porterhouse steak.
So she is now out where she can have MORE. Remember the dinner party. She got TWO steaks. Todd’s comment – “You’re usually thrilled at the idea of double meat”. https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie240/ First day of school? “You want chicken or tuna?” “CAN I HAVE BOTH?” “Sure.” https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie134/ When she meets Antoine and Marta. “Todd, don’t you feed this kid?” https://selkiecomic.com/comic/selkie201/
Or it could be that, since her species grows in a more difficult environment, the children need to (to quote Beldar Conehead ) “consume mass quantities of food” to grow correctly, and her growing body is telling her EAT MORE!!!
Yeah, there’s a thing about food-anxiety — when you aren’t entirely sure where your next meal is coming from, you can (and many to most people will) OBSESS. This can last into adulthood, too, in various forms.
If Selkie’s ever been unsure if the next meal will have anything for her to eat, it would be no wonder that she wants to eat ALL THE FISHIES! (I have similar sorts of “scan the menu” reflexes, as I don’t eat meat. And there is stealth meat in so much stuff! :p )
Good catch on the expense issue!
Agreed, she’s thrilled to be getting more to eat and the variety of it is probably still new to her too. (There was probably more variety of fish at least with her mother, but having it opened to include land animals as well is probably still pretty novel.)
So are humans. 😉
But the other Sarnothis seem pretty naturally relaxed about the situation versus playing it down.
Selkie IS also a budding supervillain in training, so it could be personalities… but she’s also the only sarnothi we know of who had to go through the discovery they were an obligate predator through trial and error, and I suspect the De’Madeias were in better shape integrating into human society compared to Selkie and Plo Quar, who from the flashbacks appear to have been living on their own. Could be those have left her with some food security issues or something.
Also, the De’Madeia family are all together and two of the three definitely eat all their meals at home. (No idea about Pohl, but I’m betting he brings his from home anyway.) Selkie’s surrounded by omnivores and vegetarians ALL THE TIME. I know I’ve got some food aversions that make me sensitive to what things I can actually eat. An eight-year-old who had to go through things entirely through trial and error having similar “Oh I can actually eat this!” thoughts and voicing them makes sense to me.
That is put so well. Good job and yes, totally.
This makes a lot of sense.
Todd and Andi are lucky that they won’t be tested on this material. It doesn’t look like either one of them is absorbing very much.
Neither are the girls it seems. 😉
I like that Sai Fen is still enjoying the sound of “cephalopod”. I can see doing that.
Keep up the good work on Selkie.It’s well drawn and well written.
@Dave: In the transcript commentary, you call the creatures “octopis”. It’s either octopuses, octopi or octopodes. I know it’s hard to use words with irregular plural forms – also words that are always in singular (eg. evidence) or plural (eg. data, media) – correctly, especially if it’s not your primary language.
I would love it if this strip went full-out Octopodes. I still consider that the superior format.
Also, people who enjoy weird plurals should give Kingdom of Loathing a shot. Enjoyable game with a weird sense of humor and puns and references everywhere… and they use every weird plural they can come up with (one box, many boxen), even if they have to make it up.
Are any of you playing Splatoon? This is reminding me of the Octolings in that game. I can totally see Felix wanting to remix Selkie’s face if she messes with him.
Dave, there’s a video I saw just last week of an octopus carrying a coconut shell along the bottom of the ocean using it’s tentacles as legs. Then at the end of it, it hid in the coconut shell!
Not sure which is more interesting.. using it’s tentacles as legs or that it knew to bring a coconut shell to hide in. It was quite interesting and showed the intelligence of the octopus quite well.
I saw a gif of that on Imgur!
Michelle, here are two links in case you haven’t run across these yet:
Ze Frank’s True Facts about the Octopus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st8-EY71K84
Little Octopus Climbing Over Rock: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Lp5a-r3MJU
The Ze Frank ones are not as family-friendly as Selkie, but both videos are amusing and I hope you like them 🙂
I love Ze Frank’s ‘true facts about …’ videos. They’re all hilarious!
Totally read his last name as Tarantino
I shouldn’t be laughing at Andi and Todd’s reactions, but I am.
I don’t find myself often agreeing with Amanda but yeah, Silkie, not everything comes down to “can I eats it.”
Another very interesting thing. The last panel is actually a nice juxtaposition of two different families. 🙂
Andi might be the most emotionally unethical human being ever. What a jerk she is! What could he have ever seen in her?
At least one family is enjoying themselves.
…And is considered nuclear.