Shrimp(s) and prawns

[Arnold Zwicky]

On Mar 10, 2009, at 9:13 PM, Jocelyn Limpert wrote:

> Oh, I just had to comment, because my mother, who in addition to
> saying "But
> I was Phi Beta Kappa" all my life, as to indicate how smart she was,
> was an
> English major with a French minor, very aware of proper usage.
> However, she
> used to insist on calling shrimp "shrimps" -- and I would argue with
> her
> about this. She would insist that it was "shrimps," never giving an
> inch.
> Now, her other speech was fine and she was very well read -- but
> "shrimps"?

from:
  Mark Liberman, 3/18/07: A moment that never we going to lost:
  http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004315.html

... And another of the five corrections -- the [zero plural] "shrimp"
in place of the normal plural "shrimps" -- is also wrong. The OED has
regular plurals for shrimp going back to 1327, and lists more recent
examples by the likes of Charles Dickens:

  >1848 DICKENS Dombey vi, She partook of shrimps and porter.<

In this morning's New York Times, the Diner's Guide has a review of a
restaurant named Spicy & Tasty, where the reviewer's enthusiasm is
expressed in plural shrimps:

  >As for the other side of the ampersand, there are juicy little
shrimps with black bean paste, shredded bean curd with an irresistibly
bouncy texture and a scallion and egg fried rice whose fluffiness is a
revelation.<

In a frame like "Today's Special: Grilled __", the [zero plural] is
the more popular choice these days: {"grilled shrimp"} has 525,000
Google hits compared to 13,000 for {"grilled shrimps"}. But many of
those 13,000 hits are in high-status contexts, like the recipe for
"Adriatic Grilled Shrimps" on the site of NPR's The Splendid Table. So
again, we're being told to subsitute a correct form for another form
that was correct to start with.

.....

> And further, what does this group think should be the proper plural if
> discussing more than one octopus? Someone told me that there are
> several
> acceptable plurals, ranging from "octopi" to "octopussys."

dictionaries generally list only the nativized plural "octopuses",
though the OED also lists the faux-Latin plural "octopi" and the Greek-
based plural "octopodes".

arnold

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