The pursuit of plurals for the English noun octopus — most recently, in yesterday’s posting “Obscure plurals of octopus (and rhinoceros)” — has now lurched into the zone of the dorky, the raunchy, and the portmanteaued with Kyle Wohlmut’s posting today on Facebook of Jon Wilkins’s webcomic Darwin Eats Cake‘s smartass Guide to Pluralizing “Octopus”:
(#1)
The cartoon seems determined to take us to the raunchy portmanteau octopussy (= octopus + pussy) and to Octopussy, the 1983 James Bond spy film, titled from its principal female character, the wicked seductress Octopussy. I’ll be following it there.
But first, a moment with a different direction on #1: Mike Pope responding to Kyle Wohlmut on Facebook, seeing in #1 a solution to the octopus-plural question:
[Gm] octopusen! A winner emerges
The film Octopussy. From Wikipedia:
(#2) A theatrical poster for the film, showing Octopussy (played by Maud Adams) getting 8 hands on James Bond (played by Roger Moore)Octopussy is a 1983 spy film and the thirteenth in the James Bond series produced by Eon Productions. It is the sixth to star Roger Moore as the MI6 agent James Bond.
… The film’s title is taken from a short story in Ian Fleming’s 1966 short story collection Octopussy and The Living Daylights, although the film’s plot is mostly original.
… In Octopussy, Bond is assigned the task of following a megalomaniacal Soviet general (Steven Berkoff) who is stealing jewellery and art objects from the Kremlin art repository. This leads Bond to a wealthy exiled Afghan prince, Kamal Khan (Louis Jourdan), and his associate, Octopussy (Maud Adams), and the discovery of a plot to force disarmament in Western Europe with the use of a nuclear weapon.
A promotional photo for the film shows Maud Adams as Octopussy wearing a long silk robe:
(#3) And giving us a pussy tease (the feminine counterpart of the cock tease) (photo: Danjaq LLC, MGM, United Artists)
On the noun pussy. Basic usage from NOAD, handily covering the pussy of Octopussy:
noun pussy: 1 informal a cat. 2 [a] vulgar slang a woman’s genitals. [b] offensive women in general, considered sexually. 3 North American informal, derogatory a timid and cowardly person (typically used of a man).
I note that NOAD labels cock ‘penis’ as vulgar slang, just as it does subentry 2a of pussy.
The taunting use of pussy against men in NOAD‘s subentry 3 is only the beginning of an extension, ultimately, from female to gay male usage. The first step, from GDoS under pussy:
10 a male homosexual; or a man judged to be or teased as being so
And then a usage I have observed, and have taken as my own:
a man’s anus, considered as a sexual organ rather than as an organ of defecation
This is a metaphorical extension of NOAD‘s subentry 2; the usage is incorporated in the well-attested compound nouns man pussy and boy pussy; see my 7/26/13 posting “‘male anus viewed as a sexual organ'”.