Because it turns it into a four-syllable word with three consecutive unstressed syllables. It has bad meter and ruins the meter of almost any sentence constructed around it.
I hadn’t thought about that, but that explanation suits me as to why “octopuses” comes off… I don’t know, muddy?… while the 1983 James Bond film named for the vulgar pun rolls off the tongue, even though they use virtually the same phonemes: it’s that the latter emphasizes the third syllable, making it metrical again.
Thank you for a nifty insight, whose effects I’d noticed but whose mechanism had never occurred to me before today!
But "teleporters" or "marathoners" or tons of other words follow the same pattern of stress and sound fine. "Photocopiers" extends it to four unstressed syllables and sounds fine.
We treat words like they have a single stressed syllable and everything else is unstressed, and that's a useful abstraction sometimes, but that's not actually true. "Photocopiers" has primary stress on the first syllable but secondary on the third - PHO-to-CO-pi-ers. The same goes for "teleporters" and "marathoners".
But that also goes for "octopuses", so what gives? Seems like there's something else going on that my brain hasn't accounted for yet. It's probably that the plosives (stop consonants) are hugely unbalanced, with all of them coming in the first half of the word. Plosives, as the word implies, can add quite a bit of oomph to a word, even if they aren't reflected in the stress pattern. So "octopuses" seems to just peter out halfway through the word.
Thank you for a nifty insight, whose effects I’d noticed but whose mechanism had never occurred to me before today!