Gramer Girl here. I'm a neon-fogarty and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language.

We talk about writing, history, rules, and cool stuff. Today we'll talk about the word fish and it's two different plurals,

and we look at why we might react to something with the word bup kiss.

The noun fish has two different, completely acceptable plurals, fish and fishes.

But fish is by far the most common plural. It's what you usually use to refer to a group or a collection of fish.

For example, if squiggly brought home a big bag of goldfish from the pet store,

ArtVerk might ask, do you have a bowl for those fish? Do you have food for those fish?

What were you thinking buying all those fish? Fishes tends to be used in more specialized areas and in some well-known sayings.

For example, scientists who study fish, they're called etheologists, eek these is Greek for fish.

These scientists often refer to different species as fishes.

A quick Google Books search returns a bunch of scientific tomes talking about different kinds of fishes that researchers have found in various regions,

such as 30 kinds of fishes off the coast of California and 149 kinds of fishes in Minnesota.

The majority of quotations using the word fishes in the corpus of contemporary American English are also from scientific publications,

like this one from the fisheries blog at blogspot.com.

Quote, some deep living fishes like the orange ruffy don't reach maturity until nearly 30 and can live to 125 years.

In fascinating, those are some old fish. And aside from scientists, people also use the word fishes in certain sayings.

The movie The Godfather popularized the saying that someone who's been killed and dumped in the ocean sleeps with the fishes.

When the corleonim mob family wondered why they couldn't reach their enforcer, Luca Brazzi.

While they were wondering, a package arrived with fish wrapped in brown paper and a bulletproof vest.

And the character Peter Clemenza explains, it's a Sicilian message. It means Luca Brazzi sleeps with the fishes.

Moving on to a less gruesome saying, in the Bible, one of Jesus' miracles is to feed thousands of followers who had gathered to hear him in a remote location with a small number of loaves and fishes.

Loaves and fishes is how I learned it, but when I checked the reference, I did find that the new international version of the Bible had actually changed it to simply fish.

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