Team venom, applying the same logic that not all poisons exist as venom. However, in a casual conversation I wouldn’t think much of it.
I made a mistake when I voted. I just looked at the two options and chose the latter:
Is a venom poisonous? Yes. Is a poison venomous? Not necessarily. So while I agreed with the OP in the poll, I don’t agree with the OP in the thread.
This exemplifies how Rigamarole was completely disingenuous in setting up the poll choices.
To me, venom is something produced by an animal (snake, insect…) and injected. Poison is everything else. You eat improperly-prepared fugu and you die, that’s poison. Poison is plants, chemicals, and sometimes animals (like that fugu).
A rattlesnake? You could eat that rattlesnake and it wouldn’t kill you, so it’s not really poisonous (as an aside: I once read that with some snake venom, it’s not harmful unless it comes in contact with broken skin, so you could theoretically ingest the venom without it harming you… I do NOT, however, plan to test this out personally).
Now, I might well refer to a poisonous snake in casual conversation, but if I have time to think about it, I know better.
Ooh: I need to think about those plants that have toxins that get under your skin via tiny hairs that basically inject them. Poison? venom? something else?
Once again democracy wins out over pedantry. The words have the same meaning despite the opinion of a few.
Excuse me while I go get the rat venom and apply it to the bait and kill those little bastards in my garage…
Venom, venom, venom…tastyfish!!!
Wha? :smack:
What are you talking about? Team venom is >70%
For whatever that’s worth. I voted “Team Venom” in the poll because you can’t really agree ‘that “poison” and “venom” have the same meaning and are interchangeable.’
However, the actual question under discussion is “Is it fundamentally incorrect to describe venomous snakes as ‘poisonous?’” There is not a lot of support for this position.
As the Master has said “We don’t vote on the facts.”
Which is incorrect according to Rigamarole’s definition as transfer through a mucus membrane is neither a bite nor a sting and must therefore be a poisoning.
Tell it to TriPolar
I didn’t vote since you don’t have an “other” option. I know the difference, but usually don’t remember to use the correct one in casual conversation. If it makes you feel any better though, when referencing it in technical reports, I would use the correct term.
If it makes you feel any better though, there isn’t one “correct” term. There are many dictionaries which allow “poisonous snakes,” and in fact, we have yet to see one which disallows it.
What a dictionary says is a fact about a dictionary. Dictionaries don’t own language. Interchanging the terms ‘venom’ and ‘poison’ does not confuse anyone.
(shrug) I’m not fighting his battles for him. I explained my opinion, and the rationale behind it. If there was an option for " Poison is a fine colloquial term, but technically incorrect" I would have chosen that. At this point I’m just chiming in to give an expert opinion regarding the use of terms as it applies in the fields of animal husbandry and emergency medical use. In those fields the terms are different and important. You don’t call poison control for a snakebite and you don’t get an anti-venom for drinking Draino.
I’ll leave the linguistic wrangling to others.
For what earthly reason why not? The Texas Poison Control Center says (under the heading “venomous critters:”)
I agree with this. The two words are not interchangeable - venom is, as it were, a specialized subset of poision. But I would not agree that it is incorrect to describe rattlesnakes as “poisionous”.
Way it works, as far as I can tell, is that it is okay to describe rattlesnakes as either poisionous or venomous (though the latter is more precise); however, it would be incorrect to describe rat poision as “venomous”.
We certainly don’t call them here. You call 911 for an ambulance.
Think of it this way; it is a bit hyperbolic and stupid, but play along.
Say you are bitten by a brightly colored snake. You look it up online but can’t seem to recall the band coloration pattern. Not wanting to go to the ER over nothing, you decide to wait a bit and see what happens. After a little while you begin to feel ill and drive yourself to the ER, by the time you get there though, you have begun to go into serious envenomation and cannot speak much. You are able to mention one word before you pass out. Since you’ve been bitten by a coral snake, ( whose venom affects the nervous system rather than attacking the blood cells and tissues) there isn’t yet much swelling or discoloration around the bite wound. The fang marks are tiny and hardly noticeable. If you mention the word “poison” they will assume that you’ve been poisoned by any number of toxic substances that might shut down your nervous system LONG before they will suspect a snake bite. If you say “venom” they will likely immediately assume you’ve been bitten by a snake or spider and begin matching your symptoms to the correct anti-venin. Of course you could just say: “Snake” 
and it would do the same, but I think this illustrates the point nicely.
Are you suggesting the terms are totally interchangeable? Because that’s not true.
In the scope of the argument, I’d say that you could switch between the two without causing confusion. Only a pedant would try to correct your mistake. But that’s a single instance of the terms being interchangeable and you can’t make a prediction on that instance alone. If I were to say, “Hey, don’t let your dog drink anti-freeze. It’s like venom to dogs,” even a laymen would give me a queer look, because the associations attached to ‘venom’ are different from those attached to ‘poison.’
And because of those associations, it’s mostly a one-way street when it comes to interchangeability. You can say ‘poison’ when you mean to say ‘venom’ because poison is a broad category and it’s inclusive of a word like venom. You could not (in any instance that springs immediately to mind) say ‘venom’ when you mean ‘poison’ because the former is more restrictive than the latter.
I don’t disagree with that. But when it comes to the case the OP is based on, they are interchangeable, and not confusing.