What do you call Five Octopus?

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Greg and Elena joined Ultimate Summer League this year. Yay for more exercise, finally!!


After the random draft, they both made it into Team 8, and Team 8 needed a more personalized name than just, you know, a number.

Consequently, a long email thread spawned candidate names that ranged from hints to current political or industry events to random puns for the number 8. Yes, when it comes to naming, this crowd often has a tendency for mathy puns.

One of the proposed names was: Octo-PI. Cute, but not enough to make the call. It would have gotten buried in with all the other silly names, had it not been for a key email response.

What happened, you ask? Something that is also typical of this crowd: a pedantic comment.

This plural version of "octopus" is questionable, because the word Octopus comes from Greek, not Latin. Thus, we should be using the Greek pluralization instead [reference link].

This is how this summer we became: Team Octopodes!!
Little keepsake to put on the fridge!
I worked on making these with my secret Etsy resource Jay, who is awesome at engraving customized tokens.


Several Ultimate games later, half of them with Mara and Gaius wiggling on the side of the field and cheering with the team, Mara finally asks one evening at bed time:

Mara: Daddy, what is Ach-Taah-Peh-Deez?

Daddy, happy to share the knowledge, went into a lengthier version of the explanation above. Twenty minutes later, here's Mara's summarization:

Mara: What do you call five octopus?
Mara: Octopus!
Mara: I was joking... [ Big grin on her face]


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