Several months apart, I ordered two different pairs of pajama pants from target.com. One was described as “tiger” when it very clearly had cheetahs or leopards or whatever on it (yes, I don’t know the difference between all the spotted felines, but I do know spots from stripes!) and now I ordered one that was called “doves” and it is very clearly owls! Come on guys, hire some people who went to Kindergarten. I’m pretty sure these are the only two animal things I’ve ever ordered from Target, and both were very clearly wrong.
As a side note, I once ordered a shirt from somewhere else that came in two colors and neither of the colors gave ANY indication of the actual color. One was a salmon color and one was a lavender color. I wanted the lavender. After some googling I guessed that I knew the lavender color but I ended being being wrong (I can’t remember the names because this was a while ago, but even if you’re an idiot, shouldn’t you be able to tell after doing google research?). Who writes the descriptions for these things?
Further to your side note. I love it when a web site shows you a picture of, say, a shirt in blue, and inform you that it’s also available in five other mysterious colours such as “crayon”, “regret”, “nucleus”, “egg” and “Croatia”.
I worked with a guy with whom I had this conversation:
“So… a goat… is that like a baby cow?”
“Um…no. A goat is a different animal. It’s a goat.”
“So… what is it then?”
[This went on for a while. I’ll spare you the rest.]
In the end he wanted to “agree to disagree”. This is why I don’t believe in agreeing to disagree. Probably 90% of people who want to agree to disagree with me are just plain wrong. The only kind of thing I can agree to disagree on is “lavender is a nice colour”. (My SO thinks there is a colour called “lavender green”, and it isn’t the grey of lavender leaves. Again, “agree to disagree” doesn’t cut it…)
One that stuck in my head was when I was letting a kid hold a small python- he excitedly tells me he can feel its bones moving, and his mother snaps at him ‘Don’t be stupid, snakes don’t have bones’. I say ‘Um… yes, they do actually’ and showed her a picture of a snake skeleton- she gave me the most furious look for daring to disagree with her… :rolleyes:
Poor kid.
The sensible looking middle aged woman who asked my mother if the monkeys laid eggs was pretty odd as well.
I’m not sure but I think you and I may have discussed this before. I had a neighbor who thought my guinea pig may have been a puppy:
“is that a baby?”
“Wait, what? No…”
“I mean, a baby dog!”
“Still no…”.
People are funny. I appreciate all caring pet-owners and people who contribute in other ways, but it just makes me laugh sometimes
There’s a song/poem that goes: “Lavender blue, dilly dilly, lavender green…” which is the likely source of this misapprehension. But it’s as scientifically accurate as weasels going pop.
I once overheard a grandmother (judging by the age difference) tell her grandchild that the white-coated animal with the long furry tail walking around in the bear enclosure was a bear cub and the it would turn brown when it got bigger.
My ex is afraid of swans (she grew up in Northern Sweden where there aren’t any, at least not close to humans) so I’ve told her “It’s just a big duck”. Her response was “A big, nasty, ill-tempered duck, yo mean”.
I hate to interrupt the smarminess, but outside of a strictly biological context “animal” is often taken to mean mammal or vertebrate, as opposed to insects or even birds/fish.
