Except that there’s no real scientific basis for the distinction.
Your first cite is to a popular magazine, not a scientific journal, and says there is a “traditional” distinction. The author is a journalist, not a scientist.
Your second cite does not mention any such distinction. It calls snakes “venomous,” but it doesn’t say it’s wrong to call them poisonous.
Your third cite is to a web comic, which I hardly think is a good source of scientific information.
That would be a case in which a plant can be considered venomous.
They were known to be venomous in the 1950s at least (I just checked a reference from 1954) and I suspect it’s been known for much longer than that.
Okey-dokey. Is the Handbook of Clinical Toxicology of Animal Venoms and Poisons, Volume 236 by Julian White and Jurg Meier scientific enough for you?
Also devil’s club, aptly named oplopanax horridus, an all-too-familiar bane of the forested areas of the PNW and southern/southeastern parts of Alaska.
Yes, I’ve known that since I was a child, and I’m 59.
I’ll grant that scientists may sometimes redefine words with a long popular use and try to restrict them to narrower categories. This does not invalidate their popular usage. Other examples are, as I mentioned, trying to claim that it’s incorrect to call any small crawling creature a “bug” except for the true bugs, the Hemiptera, or claiming that it’s incorrect to refer to an ape as a monkey in popular use.
It’s simply not correct to say it’s not permissible to refer to a snake as poisonous in popular usage.
When I was a kid, garter snakes were known to be venomous but to such a small degree they really weren’t going to be a problem. And this was many decades ago.
While a few kids in the neighborhood “knew” dragonflies were poisonous, the majority of us knew that was a myth. So we were generally not a gullible crowd on such matters.
I recently heard on the radio (P1, Sweden) that it was confirmed that the spines of the common perch (Perca fluviatilis) are slightly toxic. Something I, as a keen fisher, have long suspected…
Well, green dragonflies are poisonous. But red dragonflies are incendiary, blue dragonflies are galvanic, white dragonflies are gelid, and black dragonflies are acrid.
Do green dragonflies ripen into red dragonflies?
When I was a kid the story was that “darning needles” (as they were called) would sew your lips together if you cursed.
And I was similarly convinced at age 9 that jabbing my mortal enemy with a pencil would give him lead poisoning. All it got me was underpants full of gravel.
Not sure about all lizards, but thevaranid line, which includes goannas and iguanas, was shown to produce venom in 2005.
I’m always baffled when people pull Shakespeare into the poisonous/venomous debate, talk about an appeal to tradition, FFS.
Hmmm. I thought echidnas were venomous, but with a venom too mild to bother humans. Apparently, a better answer is that they used to be venomous, but aren’t anymore, the venom gland having evolved to serve a new purpose:
(They were always known to be venomous by the local people.)
In the 90’s the venom was isolated, identified and purified for study. It’s not an ordinary toxin, since it’s used for defeating rivals, not killing and eating or defense.
outlierrn, to what else would one appeal when discussing language? Words mean what they do for no reason other than a tradition of them having meant that in the past.
I’m baffled as to why you would be baffled by that. Shakespeare provides an example of how the word was once used. As I said, that broader usage is somewhat archaic.
So I can still call Pluto a planet, then?
Nobody’s going to stop you. But if you do call Pluto a planet, it would only make sense to call Eris one, too, and possibly Quaoar, Sedna, and a number of other outer-system objects.