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List animals until failure

rose.systems

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Re: List animals until failure

#141

Post by adrian_b »

moron4hire wrote: post #106
bigDinosaur wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people now know that a tomato is a fruit, and will distinguish it with exactly the 'did you know a tomato is not a vegetable?' fun fact, so I'm not sure this is a great point. If someone asked me to list vegetables and they were being rigorous about it I wouldn't list a tomato. If they're not being rigorous about it then anything goes really - sometimes you can put things like apples in a salad so that must be a…

A tomato is definitely a vegetable. Botanically, there are no such things as vegetables. The classification of a thing as a "vegetable" is strictly a culinary distinction. Cucumbers, tomatoes, apples, oranges, they're all the fruit of the plant, but the first two are culinarily classified as vegetables and the last two as fruits. Also, salad is a preparation method, specifically the chopping of ingredients and the ap…

In modern English, most people use "vegetable" with its current culinary meaning.

In earlier centuries, "vegetable" still had mostly its original meaning taken from Latin, where "Vegetabilia", as used e.g. by Linnaeus for the "vegetabile regnum", referred to any living beings capable of growth, but incapable of motion, i.e. mainly to the terrestrial plants.

Strictly speaking, seeds, grains, nuts, fruits, roots, bulbs, leaves, stems, etc. are all parts of vegetables.

What in English is now called "vegetables" corresponds to the Latin word "holera", whose original meaning was "greens", and not at all with the Latin word "vegetabilia". Also English "fruits" does not correspond with Latin "fructa", but with Latin "poma". Latin "fructa" referred to the useful results of some activity, a sense still encountered more rarely in English.

Re: List animals until failure

#143

Post by moron4hire »

adrian_b wrote: post #141
moron4hire wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tomato is definitely a vegetable. Botanically, there are no such things as vegetables. The classification of a thing as a "vegetable" is strictly a culinary distinction. Cucumbers, tomatoes, apples, oranges, they're all the fruit of the plant, but the first two are culinarily classified as vegetables and the last two as fruits. Also, salad is a preparation method, specifically the chopping of ingredients and the ap…

In modern English, most people use "vegetable" with its current culinary meaning. In earlier centuries, "vegetable" still had mostly its original meaning taken from Latin, where "Vegetabilia", as used e.g. by Linnaeus for the "vegetabile regnum", referred to any living beings capable of growth, but incapable of motion, i.e. mainly to the terrestrial plants. Strictly speaking, seeds, grains, nuts, fruits, roots, bulbs…

> a sense still encountered more rarely in English.

I don't know what you mean by that. People do talk about "the fruits of" their labors.

Re: List animals until failure

#144

Post by adrian_b »

keanebean86 wrote: post #128
eru wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apples are not fruit in the strict botanical sense. > Apples are considered "accessory fruits" (or sometimes termed "false fruits") rather than true botanical fruits because the fleshy, edible part develops primarily from the flower's hypanthium or receptacle, not just the ovary. The actual, true fruit is the core containing the seeds, making it a pome.

These discussions are really fun to me. The opportunities to be absurdly pedantic are almost endless. Common words for things gloss over so many details. Most of the time those details aren't important but they still exist and there's someone on the internet that cares deeply about them.

We must accept that most people are careless in their choice of words, so they frequently do not use the words in their strict sense but they use them in a broad sense, instead of using the most appropriate word.

However this is annoying, because especially with the modern fashion that linguistics shall be only descriptive and not prescriptive, like in the past, many words have become more and more ambiguous.

For this reason, misunderstandings have become more and more frequent, especially when using a medium like an Internet forum, which forces conciseness. Now, if you want to be certain that you will be understood correctly, more and more often you are forced to first define exactly many of the words that you intend to use, because the same words may be used by others with different meanings, even if in earlier literature everybody used only the meaning that you want.

Re: List animals until failure

#145

Post by adrian_b »

moron4hire wrote: post #143
adrian_b wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In modern English, most people use "vegetable" with its current culinary meaning. In earlier centuries, "vegetable" still had mostly its original meaning taken from Latin, where "Vegetabilia", as used e.g. by Linnaeus for the "vegetabile regnum", referred to any living beings capable of growth, but incapable of motion, i.e. mainly to the terrestrial plants. Strictly speaking, seeds, grains, nuts, fruits, roots, bulbs…

> a sense still encountered more rarely in English. I don't know what you mean by that. People do talk about "the fruits of" their labors.

That it what I mean.

This old sense is encountered, like in your example, but much more often "fruits" is used in the culinary sense.

Many people perceive your example as a metaphor, the results of the labor being compared with the fruits of a tree, but in reality the direction of the metaphor has historically been opposite, the fruits of the tree being called thus because they were considered the useful results of its cultivation.

Re: List animals until failure

#146

Post by bonyt »

I just made a variant of this that uses the browser speech recognition API. It's simplified, with none of the flair of the original, but should be fun to play in person. It's fun to shout animal names at computer with friends.

https://t.moveything.com/animalscream/

(works best on desktop chrome. it's too slow on safari in my testing.)

Re: List animals until failure

#147

Post by billynomates »

baxtr wrote: post #126
cainxinth wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It raises the question: can a colony of individual animals (zooids in this case) that work cooperatively be called a singular animal itself? I think biologists say yes, but it’s an interesting taxonomic boundary.

AFAIK, a "super-organism" composed of individual entities is defined as one where the long-term fitness interests of those individuals and their groups are completely and permanently aligned. For example an ant colony is a super-organism. That’s why it makes sense for a soldier ant to die for her queen.

Then why isn't a human a super-organism? We are composed of many different types of bacteria after all.

Re: List animals until failure

#148

Post by eutropia »

jmtulloss wrote: post #37
themanmaran wrote: post #8

68. The unique title texts are really fun. But I strongly disagree that "chipmunks are squirrels".

This is what I'm saying. Chipmunks are not squirrels. I will do my best on this hill.

is "do my best" some kind of weird censorship-speak euphemism for "die"???

Re: List animals until failure

#149

Post by embedding-shape »

billynomates wrote: post #147
baxtr wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, a "super-organism" composed of individual entities is defined as one where the long-term fitness interests of those individuals and their groups are completely and permanently aligned. For example an ant colony is a super-organism. That’s why it makes sense for a soldier ant to die for her queen.

Then why isn't a human a super-organism? We are composed of many different types of bacteria after all.

Some of the "entities" aren't aligned always, like when a person is pregnant for example. I think also our (human) cells doesn't operate as semi-autonomous agents with independent nervous systems and agency, unlike a ant colony.
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