[keanebean86]

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.

[ileonichwiesz]

My wife is a biologist, and as I understand biology on an academic level is just near-constant arguments about seemingly basic terms and concepts.

Life, species, gene, organism - we don’t actually have consistent definitions of what those are. Biology is the science of fluid spectrums, so any rigid classification you’d propose breaks down at the edges.

[adrian_b]

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.

[eru]

I wouldn't blame people. 'Fruit' is a perfectly fine English word.

I would blame botanists for overloading everyday terms with their own specialised meanings.

Mathematicians are also prone to this, but I guess it's less likely someone will mix up a ring or field in the everyday sense and in the mathematical sense.

[almosthere]

TIL tomatoes ARE vegetables and apples ARE NOT fruit!