Obviously it isn't yours. And, YES, horticulture is.

beesneeds, it might be best if we all stopped posting to this thread :-) As I stated earlier, LCHS teacher doesn't get it, refuses to get it and insists on dispensing incorrect information regardless of whatever irrefutable evidence is offered to the contrary. I have reported this thread with the hopes the mods will delete it for the bad information it started out with and still contains and for the unnecessary argumentativeness of the OP.

And sorry LCHS, but you have made it blatantly apparent that horticulture is NOT your area of expertise! And not so good with the English usage either. I think you need to go back to school rather than teach. A fail on all levels.

Not me refusing anything.

"In English, and more to the particular the bastardization of the language that is American, cactuses and cacti are both acceptable and commonly used plural forms of cactus."

Quite, Bees'. English likes to absorb other words and make them its own. Any native speaker will roll the word "cactus" around in their heads (as I'm doing) and declare it feels "English enough" to simply say "cactuses." Give that one a couple centuries and kiss "cacti" goodbye except as a formal oddity like the genitive case. :-)

But cactus certainly is not West Germanic (English's defined parent language group), or Old French (our...well, call it a stepmother).

We found English's Blob-like absorption of words and structures amusing to the extreme in most of my classes on the subject.

Non-native speakers, however, do not.

Source: The fraggin' Oxford English Dictonary, which is most definitely considered definitive and allows both cactuses and cacti at this time, but considers cactuses a bit less common, albeit completely acceptable. As well as listing cactus as arising from the Latin/Greek. :-)

"In English, and more to the particular the bastardization of the language that is American, cactuses and cacti are both acceptable and commonly used plural forms of cactus."

And I said this.

The internet is great.

People, I don’t know if there is one troll here or two trolli (possibly trolluses), but come to your senses. All arguments have been made, and repeated, and repeateded, there is nothing more to say. Feed your plants, not a troll who is only laughing at you.

The very last thing I thought I’d come across on this forum is a post on etymology. The original poster is correct but the second poster is also correct. If used over time, the new word becomes the accepted norm ... Just like the word Kleenex; it’s a brand but it’s accepted as ‘tissue‘. I find it interesting that Houzz uses ‘cacti’.

Mica mica parva stella

miror quaenam sis tam bella

splendens eminus in illo

alba velut gemma caelo

Since this thread is still rolling along, I thought I'd show off about the only thing I remember from all my years of junior high and high school Latin, Hope I got the spelling right :-)

Maria Elena, you are correct.

SLD, “Twinkle twinkle, little star”...? ...or a version of? I looked it up on Google translate and that’s what it reminds me of. Not an exact translation, but similar.

lol, you got it, Stewart :-) At least something from those Latin classes stuck with me over the decades!

SUPER easy to put in a Google search. TONS of results but the problem is you never know how accurate they are... :;-)

What! Cactuses? Are you kidding?

lol,Maria..I hadn't even noticed that! Houzz using CACTI. That might be the frosting on the cake?...for now.

Ruben Pacarat, Cactuses is correcct.

Really? We are feeding the troll again? After 160 replies???

It's sad when someone thinks that education is trolling.

It's sad that this conversation has gone on for 7 years now. I do agree with that.

Them stop commenting with 100% incorrect claims!!

Cacti is the correct one. My Grandma told me when I was a youngster gardening with her every afternoon. She was always right.

Haven't gardengal

gardengal48 scribed into the eternal flow of great linguistic utterances, "Them stop commenting with 100% incorrect claims!!"

"Then" stop commenting and so on. Honestly, if we're going to comment on a linguistic thread, perhaps some level of spelling and grammatical competence should be our first goal.

Since the Oxford English Dictionary (and I do not think anybody here has the chops to argue with the editors there) agrees that both cacti and cactuses are correct, the supposition contained in that statement is also incorrect.

I'll shortcut the personal insult coming back to me as I'm finding them tedious lately; could you send your friend over, the one to whom I was speaking before? You know, HIM? It was enjoyable engaging more than six brain cells and not enduring fifth-grade "Mean Girls" levels of insult. Kthxbai and all that. Intelligent commentary welcome, of course.

Personally, I love the terms trolli and trolluses :) that was worth reading through these posts :)

Yes, I'm finding the trolluses (is that the female version of troll?) very tiring myself recently.

Maybe it might be helpful to look up the definition of what an online troll is and see exactly who of the responders fits that description. "a troll is a person who starts flame wars or intentionally upsets people on the internet by posting inflammatory and digressive, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community with the intent of provoking readers into displaying emotional responses and normalizing tangential discussion, either for the troll's amusement or a specific gain." It doesn't take any particular insight to see how that applies in several very recent posts. I also am finding the troll(s) rather tiring and consistently irritating. He never fails reaching for any opportunity he can to elicit a grin at someone else's expense.

Then of course there is the issue of how one may focus in on a simple typo and make a big hooha out what is essentially nothing. The minutiae some small minds like to follow!

Intelligent commentary is always welcome....too bad some responders are just not capable of it without having to slam someone else.

Don't worry.......I'm sure we will hear back from the troll in chief!! He loves having the last word.

So, the "troll" cannot be the person who started the conversation. Only those who reply with comments without considering what the OP was intending.

I believe the female troll would be trolla, trollus being masculine. Might be better to stick with the neuter, trollum.

I don't think there exists a rule that the op can't be a troll. I think that it's perfectly acceptable, and happens frequently, for a troll to start a thread.

Reread the definition. It could be the original poster, although in this case it was not. Just a simple misstatement, not an intent to cause dissension. But those who continue to post insisting they are correct when it has been clearly demonstrated that they are not (thereby causing dissention) and those who bring up all manner of other, non-related comments just to incite or belittle most surely are.

"Don't worry.......I'm sure we will hear back from the troll in chief!! He loves having the last word."

As I thought about it, this is simply a blatant attempt at shutting down conversation with the equivalent of a six year old's "Shut up, I WIN!"

Fortunately, there's an equally simple sentence that answers this kind of chicanery quite simply.

"No."

And chicanery it is. If your argument requires the attempt to shut down speech counteracting it, you may want to rethink your argument and simply not post it. It probably isn't very good and you may have been the one insulting somebody pointlessly in the first place and deserved what you got in return.

But in this case, it isn't.

I think most people on this thread are aware of this already. As a German who knows Latin and has studied German and English linguistics at an academic level, I can confirm that the English word "cactus" is not, in fact, derived from the German word "Kaktus." Both come from the botanical term for the plant, which is, as botanical terms tend to be, Latin and has its origins in Greek. "Cactuses" as well as "Cacti" are both accepted as plural forms in the English language.

Just because they are accepted doesn't make them right.

Lord love a duck!! The definition of 'accepted' is "recognized to be valid or correct". How much more 'right' would you like?

And where do these just-sign-on-to-make-one-stupid-comment-on-an-8-year-old-thread yo-yo's come from anyway? Do they just cruise through cyberspace looking for some place to troll? And why do they relentlessly display such a basic, fundamental lack of education?

So you are agreeing or disagreeing with them? Sounds like you are agreeing then call them uneducated.

^^^ QED 🥴

Goal, GG!

Well, until the next time it is brought back up. Six months to 2 years later.

Dr. Seuss was banned for less ...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cactus#

Still doesn't mean anything. Too many missed my point.

I think what is actually interesting here is something that has not even been mentioned.

"The word cactus derives, through Latin, from the Ancient Greek word κάκτος (káktos), a name originally used by Theophrastus for a spiny plant whose identity is now not certain.[5]"

This means that the original Greek word, borrowed into Latin, was actually being used to describe some spiny plant, and although the species is not certain, we can be sure of one thing, Namely, that it was not in the family Cactaceae as all Cactaceae are native to the Americas (North, Central, South, and Caribbean). How would the Greeks and Romans be using the word for a plant indigenous to a hemisphere whose flora had not yet been encountered by the Europeans. They might have been describing a Euphorbia (an Old World family of plants), and obviously, Euphorbias are not in the family Cactaceae despite the spines.

P.S., The plural of cactus is cacti (accepted Latin plural), and cactuses (as the word was borrowed into English and takes the suffix (-s) to mark it was plural. Not that complicated.

Margaritaville, the Greek origins was covered five years ago and again a year ago in this thread. You need to click on the 'see 135 more comments' line at the top of the comments list to expand previous comments that covers it.

I think you missed the point.

Perhaps I did miss it, I thought your point was that Greek origins hadn't been mentioned yet, and so you supplied information that you may not have been aware had already been submitted in the thread previously. What was your point then?

"What was your point then?"

That the word CACTUS was originally used for spiny plants of Old World origin which were definitely NOT cacti, cactuses, cactus....(of family, Cactaceae), which are all New World plants (without exception), and so would have been unknown to the Europeans prior to 1492.

Well yeah, it was originally used for plants like the prickly Spanish artichoke (also cardoon to a lesser extent), and Linnaus referred the name to the prickly plants of the Americas as cactus under the notion they were related to the European plants... which of course they aren't.

That was already covered earlier in the thread, but great that you are repeating it.

Good grief. When I saw that this thread was actually started more than 8 years ago, I thought I'd take a look. What fun it is to read the absolute nonsense here -- and the length of time for people have amused themselves with it.

All this time I thought I was bad. A few days ago at Lowes, I bought an Aloe hybrid that I'm sure is a Kelly Griffin hybrid from Altmans. It was labeled "White Star" but I've been looking all over the internet for photos and after MUCH searching, I'm 95% sure it's Krakatoa. So, for my own records, I'm about to label it as such. This morning, I woke up and thought -- Robin, how can you waste SO MUCH TIME fussing over the name of a hybrid aloe! Label it, repot it and be done with it!

And then I stumbled onto this thread and laughed out loud. Looks like I didn't waste any time at all fussing about my little Krakatoa. Happy new year to all you succulent lovers like me!

Sorry. I didn't know it would last that long.

When this was started,Windows 95 was new and people went to chat rooms. I was also thin with hair.

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