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I have to say, I find the responses in this thread to be refreshingly sensible. For years, I’ve been annoyed by the “chimp is not a monkey” pedants.
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The Librarian is not a chimp, so I’m not gonna do it.
That, and I like my arms better when they’re attached.
For some reason I thought what I quoted said ape instead of chimp. :smack:
D’oh! You’re right, that’s what I get for assuming you quoted the post right above yours, and not actually reading it.
FWIW, “monkey” has been an English word for only a couple hundred years. The older word “ape” included all monkeys and apes. I have questioned native speakers of German, Italian, French, and Italian and discovered that none of those languages distinguishes them. If you look up “ape” in my French-English dictionary, it gives the definition “grande singe sans queue” (i.e. big tailless monkey, which is also inaccurate).
Curious George is certainly monkey sized.
We Primatologists do not call an ape a monkey because to us they are two distinct terms. In fact, one of my professors loved to say that monkey bars should be called ape bars. While it is true that the term ‘monkey’ might be used by those who (incorrectly) suggest a common descent, there are many similarities between monkeys that give the term meaning and cause it to be distinctly different from ape. The term ‘monkey’ is paraphyletic, and I don’t believe it is correct to argue that that we must completely ignore paraphyletic terminology. It has its uses.
For those of us in the field, ape refers to only to those in Hominoidea. Those who are arguing that apes should be including under the label monkey have probably never heard of the term ‘simian’, which is the proper term to use for the group that encompasses both monkeys and apes. A monkey is a non-ape simian.
Curious George does not have a tail and exhibits brachiation, both ape characteristics. However, he also reminds me strongly of a white-faced capuchin. I imagine he was created as a combo of those two.
As I said above, H. A. Rey was thinking mainly of the marmosets he saw in Brazil when he first starting writing those stories.
Is this really a question for zoologists or literary historians?
True. “Ape” goes back to before the 12th century, while “monkey” appears in English about 1530.
Originally the term “ape” only applied to what are now called monkeys, since the great apes had not yet become known to Europeans. Topsell’s History of Four-Footed Beasts (1607), the first bestiary in English, mentions 10 different varieties of apes, one of them being “monkeys.” Eventually, the term ape began to be used mainly for the tailless varieties of monkeys, such as the Barbary Ape(Macaque). The great apes began to be known to science starting in the late 1600s with the orangutan. Eventually they were recognized as a group separate from monkeys, and the term ape became restricted to them.
If you consider singe to be the generic term for non-human primate in French, I don’t see why it would be inaccurate. In fact, the usage is the same as the basic colloquial one in English.
From Merriam-Webster:
Oh, I forgot to mention, personality-wise, Curious George is very much a capuchin, rather than the one semi-brachiating monkey: the spider monkey. I’ve observed both in the wild, and white-faced capuchins are very much like 6 year old boys who constantly get into mischief. Capuchins are incredibly curious and highly intelligent, and I’m sure capuchin owners would have many stories of their pets getting into trouble.
I’ve never worked with chimps, so I can’t say what they are like, personality wise.
I just turned my Curious George calendar over to May and this is what I saw:
George ambling past a billboard which reads ‘This way to the monkeys’ and underneath, a picture of two monkeys looking virtually identical to George except with tails.
So HA and Margaret Rey weren’t averse to drawing tails, they just didn’t want one on George, either for aesthetic reasons or due to some undislcosed backstory involving amputation.
The illustrations for the first story involving George, ‘Cecily G and the Nine Monkeys,’ show that all eight of George’s siblings are missing tails.
If it doesn’t have a tail it’s not a monkey
Even if it has a monkey kind of shape!
We can very plainly see if it’s a monkey, if it doesn’t have a tail, it’s not a monkey it’s an ape!
Is TMITYH supposed to be a poacher? I ask because I’ve had that impression most of my life because of George’s capture in the first book.
The Man in the Yellow Hat appears to be a hunter (he carries a rifle) and is probably also an animal dealer. Saying he was a poacher implies that what he was doing was illegal, but at the time there were few if any laws about collecting animals from the wild. The Man in the Yellow Hat lures George to be captured with his hat; there is no indication in the first book that George was abandoned. He later “gives” George to the zoo (but probably actually sold him). He may be modeled to some degree after Frank “Bring 'Em Back Alive” Buck, the famous animal dealer who caught animals in the wild and sold them to zoos and circuses.
