Octopodes and Interrogation Points

--> I have a few old books I have picked up from antique stores here and there over the years. Like most precious antiques, none of them are worth any money, and truly hold little value of any kind. But they smell funny, and look important, so I keep them around. I have volumes of poetry from writers no anthology has ever known, signed by the authors. I have editions of the classics never seen at Barnes and Noble. And I have a few other odds and ends.

One of these books, which I have actually thumbed through one or twice, is a grammar book printed in 1879. I prize it above all the others. It doesn't only look cool, it has a unique feature that the others don't. This grammar book contains exercises which, by all modern accounts, would be material considered far too difficult fro the fragile minds of college freshman. Yet, as if to add salt to the wound created by lowered expectations of the ages, it seems to have once belonged to a child. The past was cruel indeed. But the sheer monotony and difficulty of the thing is not the reason I like it. I like it because there is a funny joke in it. Its brittle pages contain a mean-spirited, cruel little joke that has survived for over a hundred years. On the inside front cover, written in the most unconcerned pencil-based cursive of a ten-year-old child, is a little rhyme. It reads: Jack was here, so please don't fear, if you don't believe me turn here - turn to page 79. And when one accepts such directions blindly, and turns to page 79, one finds another sentence scrawled at the top of the page: you are a fool for looking. Children will never change.

My initial discovery of this limerick had me thinking. Kids these days don't use "fool" as a derogatory term nearly as often as they probably should, or as often as they apparently used to. This prompted me to explore the book a little further.

Aside from this little amusement, I noticed another funny joke about the book. As I reviewed the list of conventions popular in North American English in 1879, I noticed that question marks do not exist anywhere in the book. They do not appear in the table of contents, nor in any discussion of end punctuation. But, oddly enough, they do appear properly in many of the sample sentence diagrams, an example of which is shown below.

Are all of the filthy savages eradicated from the plains?

It seemed odd for such an important part of the written language to be missing completely from instructional materials of the time. After all, periods were there, commas, colons, semicolons (and no one knows how to use those), and even exclamation points! But as I scanned the text over and over again, I could not locate question marks. Instead I found interrogation points.

Interrogation points? Exactly.

At about this same time in my actual life, I had been reading much about recent discoveries involving the superior intelligence of common mollusks. It seems that any given octopus might be smarter than we think. This notion has been evidenced by the fact that they are routinely taught to count, and to open mason jars and remove objects. They have even been accused of, though not properly observed, sneaking out of aquarium homes, sneaking into nearby tanks of lesser fish known as "food" and devouring them on site, or carrying them back to their home aquarium to tease them mercilessly before eating them and pretending nothing had happened. They leave a wet, slimy trail on the carpet. That is just sneaky.

As I am sure you can imagine, this frightened me terribly. They seem to be plotting and scheming, qualities I had previously only feared in my fellow human beings. They can use their tentacles in manners consistent with the ways those of us at the top of the food chain might use opposable thumbs. But we don't have eight opposable thumbs! What if they were organized? What might these so called "pets" really be capable of? But I digress.

I wondered what the proper plural form of "octopus" might look like. I had already ruled out "octopussies," though that is what they will hear if they cross my path on a dark night! Again I digress.

It seems that all modern lexicons can offer are two common uses and speculations, which nobody seems to agree are correct. "Octopi" seems to be used most often, and was intuitive to me at the time, a nice plural of Latin origin, like cacti and peni. The problem is that the word "octopus" is actually Greek in origin. So "octopi" is merely a commonly accepted bastardization of a plural form. The other option is "octopuses," which though MS Word believes it, is just another, more modern bastardization, which I think we can all agree does not sound right at all.

I took the opportunity to consult the wisdom of the 1879 primer, which was obviously much closer to the ancient Greeks than I and my new enemies the octopuses were. I found an entry. And this wise volume named the plural of octopus as "octopodes." Now that is a proper Greek suffix.

I again thought about the evolutionary nature of language. I was reminded of some of my teacher friends telling me that at the lower grades, they have been teaching children to identify "talking marks" in text. This is of course, is a new name used to describe devices otherwise known as "quotation marks." I am sure that this is exactly what happened to interrogation points. At some point, it just seemed easier to call them question marks.

And so I think of my children, talking marks, octopodes and interrogation points. And I teach them the things I have learned. I want my children to know about octopodes and interrogation points.

Why is this important? Not to preserve and purity in language, I don't believe in that. Besides I use the "F-bomb" far more often than a well-educated, grown man should. I use it constantly and consistently. And we all know that excessive use of the f-word is widely and popularly considered to be a vice of the particularly ignorant, uncreative, and lazy. I may very well be all of these things. But I clearly understand and admire the changing nature of language.

It is important because sometimes we should stand against the flow. Sometimes, the things that all the people around us accept as correct and good are not necessarily correct and good. And this is a very difficult concept to teach to children. We ask them to respect authority, and chastise them when they question it. Still, we want them to understand that all of the population of Germany during WWII should have known better, though they were all just respecting authority and public opinion. We want them to know that the results polls are no way to determine your vote for any candidate in our democracy. We want them to develop principals, ethics, morals, and sound judgment. But we teach them that following the "norm" and maintaining status quo are important.

And it seems to me that there are lessons in grammar more important than subject-verb agreement and parenthetical statements (and what are those anyway?). It seems to me that octopuses and question marks, though widely accepted and rarely questioned, are not our only options. It seems to me that octopodes and interrogation points deserve to exist now as much as they ever did. There is often a need to defy convention. And even if it is not strictly necessary, it should still be done.

So I will tell my children, that of all the useless facts, crazy stories and questionable concepts they have ever learned from me, out of all the so-called "knowledge" I may spill on them over the years, they need only remember two things. If they forget everything else I ever teach them, I hope that they will always remember octopodes and interrogation points.