Where I go on about things that annoy me. · 4:10am Nov 15th, 2013
What I should be doing: Finishing the next chapter of Celestia Sleeps In With a Vengeance, Scootaloo Finds a Truck in the Everfree Forest, or Onto the Pony Planet. Working on A Gift From Celestia II. I could even be revising some of my other work that’s languishing on the “I’ll get to it later” pile and the “not dead yet” pile. Heck, I could do laundry, too. If it wasn’t dark and cold, I could put a battery charger on my Grand Marquis and try to get it started—especially since I plan to be driving the old beast this winter. $300 cars are the best winter beaters because you don’t care what happens to them.
(it's not nearly as nice as that pic makes it look)
I’m not doing any of those things, though. Instead, I’m going on a rant. A bit of a tirade. I was fulminating; now I’m pontificating. (Oh, google. You make finding synonyms too easy.)
We all see the posts in this group or that group about things we hate in the fandom, or things that annoy us, or whatever. Well, now it’s my turn! I’m not going to post it on a forum, though; but here’s my top 3:
The plural of Pegasus is pegasi, just like the plural of octopus is octopi.
Ok, I accept that pegasus has become the default name for a winged horse in recent mythology (which is probably the best way to describe role-playing games, collectable card games, video games, and books). It’s just the same as minotaur—in Greek myth, there was the minotaur. Only one.
I also accept that in English, it’s been presumed to be pluralized by changing the -us ending to -i, just like a second-declension Latin noun. That’s wrong, but it’s what’s done. Fair enough. They do it in popular culture, they do it in My Little Pony (so it’s canon!). But comparing it to another word that also isn’t Latin and also shouldn’t be pluralized by changing the ending to -i really grinds my gears. Is the plural of rendezvous rendezvoi?* Really, if you want to make the comparison, use a word that’s actually a second-declension Latin noun, like focus/foci, taurus/tauri or cactus/cacti. (Cactus is also Greek in origin, so don’t use it. I just learned that a moment ago [thanks Wikipedia for telling me before I published!] and am therefore rescinding it as an example.)
I pondered this today, trying to think up a similar comparison that wasn’t so esoteric that nobody would get it. It’s a little contrived, but here we go.
Japan is a continent because Greenland is a continent. All islands which are a single nation are a continent.
Obviously, this is completely false. However, here’s how the reasoning could come about:
Australia is a continent. It looks about the size of Greenland on a map (it’s not—Austrialia is about 2.8 million square miles; Greenland is a paltry 836,000 square miles, making it only slightly larger than Saudi Arabia). One might assume that islands that large must be continents . . . and then assume that all island nations are continents.
So let’s all remember:
1:: The word Pegasus is Greek, and is a name for a single winged horse. There is not a plural form of it, any more than there is a plural form of Chicago or Elvis.
2: The word Pegasus is Greek, which means if there were a Greek plural for it, it would not be changing the -us ending to -i,because that is Latin rules, not Greek. It is no more correct than octopi being the correct plural of octopus.
2a: By Greek rules, the correct plural of octopus is octopodes.
3: By English rules, Pegasus should be made plural by adding -es (since it ends with the letter s), so it would become Pegasuses.
3a: By English rules, the correct plural of octopus is octopuses.
4: In show canon, a group of pegasuses is referred to as 'pegasi,' thus making it correct by default for fanfiction. It has also entered the popular English lexicon as the plural, even if it is not technically correct. (It's certainly not the only word like that; the proper past tense of 'sneak' is 'sneaked,' although 'snuck' is so commonly used it's a generally accepted variant.)
4a: Similarly, octopi is a commonly accepted plural—but it won't pass muster in a research paper.
*rendezvous can be a noun, and can, therefore be plural. The plural form is the same as the singular, because that’s how the French roll.
If you don’t eat meat (specifically bacon), you’ll die.
That’s just silly. Yes, a vegetarian diet is less nutrient-dense than an omnivorous diet. This surely was a problem for our hunter-gatherer forebearers, who were smart enough to figure out that one mammoth steak = about one ton of spinach. Even better, once they figured out that they could make spears to get them when they were hungry, and make fires to cook them so they’d be chewable and more easily digestible (instead of having to wait until one died and decomposed a little bit), we were ready to go from primitives living in dark caves to civilized people not having vitamin deficiencies watching Lindsay Lohan tumble off her shiny pedestal courtesy of our 800” flat-screen televisions.
(I expect to hear from her lawyers)
Seriously, though, in a modern society, where nutritious fresh vegetables are available at the local supermarket year-round, one can get all the nutrients they need on a vegetarian diet—or even a vegan diet, if they so choose. One assumes that the same would hold true in Equestria (especially since the ponies would likely have figured out how to store fresh vegetables and grasses). We don’t know that for sure; the Hearth’s Warming Eve episode suggested that Windigo-caused winters were particularly harsh), but we saw all the same ponies after Winter Wrap-Up, so one presumes that they’ve got food storage handled.
Can you get vitamin or mineral deficiencies from a non-meat diet? Sure you can. Can you eat meat and still have vitamin and mineral deficiencies? You bet! Can you get all the nutrients your body needs from non-meat sources? Absolutely! (And I’m not counting vitamin supplements in the mix, either.) Feel free to do some research from credible sites if you don’t believe me (I’d be suspicious of articles on NothingButBacon.com* or peta.org).
“But wait a minute,” you say. “The ponies wouldn’t know how much Vitamin B12 a human needs in a day!” Of course they don’t. I bet the average reader doesn’t, either. Better hope you make it to Equestria with a functioning cell phone that gets Wikipedia. [It would be going far off topic here to consider that the fundamental structure of Equestrian vegetables (or anything/everything else) is different than on Earth. If that’s the case . . . well, if you’re lucky, you’ll live long enough to starve to death.]
*I made that one up, but it turns out it’s a real web site. Who knew?
This segues neatly into my final topic: Teeth.
They’ll know we eat meat because of our teeth!
Well, let’s look at human teeth for a bit. We’ve got 8 incisors, 4 canine teeth, 8 pre-molars, and 8-12 molars (the last four, the wisdom teeth may or may not erupt, and there may not be all four). It’s those canine teeth which label us as the monsters we are omnivores, because a herbivore certainly wouldn’t have them, right?
(You can see by her teeth that she's dangerous.)
Well . . .
Discounting Chimpanzees (because they apparently will kill and eat tasty animals), as well as other monkeys (because I’m too lazy to search for the diets of all different kinds of monkeys and then if they’re exclusively herbivore or frugivore try and find a picture of one with its mouth open and hope that it’s actually a picture of what I say it is, because darned if I’d know, and because this sentence is getting awfully long and run-on-ish <inhales> there is one common herbivore on Earth which has canine teeth—and it’s one we’ve seen in Equestria, so they must know what they are!
Presenting . . . the horse.
Yeah.
And . . . the Zebra!
And . . . the mule!
Ok, the last one’s kind of a trick. It’s a donkey. But as we all know, a mule is the offspring of a horse and a donkey, so it stands to reason that since horses have canine teeth and donkeys have canine teeth, mules probably have quite similar canine teeth.
In counting, we’ll find that equines have a total of 12 incisors, up to 4 canine teeth (stallions have them; some mares do and some don’t . . . kind of like wisdom teeth), and 24 molars.
So, in conclusion, a visual examination of a human’s teeth by an equine dentist would lead her to believe that humans probably eat the same thing as ponies do, based on dental structure.
And there you have it! My three rants! Complete with glossy pictures! Now back to writing! 
The last guy to do that accidentally fried Luna's brain with the collective knowledge of the Internet. So, maybe that's not such a good idea. (See TTEOAP)
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TTEOAP was one of the earlier fanfics that I read. Trixie's sacrifice caused unabashed liquid pride. Thank Celestia I didn't read it at work. That and Project: Sunflower are on the (very) short list of fics where ponification actually works.
I actually considered linking your lute-playing dude in the blog, but didn't want to give anypony else nightmares.
1508977
Isthatwhat you meant?Pfft, you and your synonyms.(It's around the 45 sec mark.)
Well alrighty then.
Edit: Ah, you saw the old gif!
1508982
Oh, you wish it was the engineer.
img.pandawhale.com/51881-road-to-el-dorado-guitar-gif-I-M2wG.gif
That is what happened when I clicked the link in gMail.
Cannot unsee.
There's nothing wrong with a good rant. And this was a good rant. I thoroughly enjoyed it. My only regret is that I didn't have a cup of tea while reading it.
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In the future, I will remember to suggest that all readers have the beverage of their choice close to hand (or hoof!) before reading.
Huh. Did not know that about the plural of Octopus.
As for the horse teeth, I think you have it backwards. It's not that some herbivores have canines, its that the equines are evolving, and someday soon it will be the horses who are making us into the filler for those supposedly all beef hotdogs/other ground meat products that everyone knows is really horse! Next the'll be making us pull plows or making cutesie foal's entertainment involving miniature humans learning about friendship, but due to excellent writing attracts a large secondary audience of adult horses. It will be madness! Well, that or the cats finally grow opposable thumbs and then human and equine alike screwedcutestuff.co/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/cute_cat_with_two_opposable_thumbs.jpg
The part about plurals where interesting. I'm still going to use pegasi though, since it sounds much better than the other alternatives.
And that mule (donkey) needs a dentist.
Overall good rant sir, good rant.
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And people will be jumping all over you if you don't. Besides, you've got the excuse that it's canon.
Just like cutie-marks being on the flank--according to a vet, she wouldn't call that part of a horse the flank, but in the show, Cheerilee called it the flank. I figure if the teacher calls it that, it's acceptable.
You were right- I was most amused by this!
Also, the only thing better for winter driving than a beater like the Grand Marquis is an all-wheel drive car- sideways action when you want it, good behavior when you don't.