Fish or Fishes

Just as I turned on my MSN this morning to wish Mr Jimmy Lai good morning, I was greeted by a lecture on fish and fishes. Apparently in my previous blog post on Restoran 2008 Snow Beer, I wrote this sentence 'We had, I think about 5 big bottles of Carlsberg and 2 fishes'.

Apparently, Mr English Teacher who claims he's here to correct my England and not write reports, claims that there is no FISHES and only fish. What I was taught in school, fish or fishes are both gramatically correct. After much argument, I decided to do a google search and typed in the key words 'plural of fish'. A whole list of arguments and other people's queries were listed:-wiki, yahoo answers, etc.

Yeah yeah and guess what I found. English Teacher is right and wrong in a way. This site probably gave one of the better definition of fish and fishes.

"Fish" is one of those off words that's usually both singular and plural. So we can say 'we ate 5 fish'.

But we can use "fishes" when talking about different species of fish:- The fishes of the Fraser River include salmon and sturgeon.

So in my post, technically I had 2 fish of the same species - so my England is gramatically wrong. Yes, and I've corrected it!

So there you go guys, please use fish and fishes correctly. If you read through the site, it also teaches you on the right way to use beer and beers - for those alchy out there.