I understand the word “vegetarian” can have different meanings, but does not the actual true and standard one mean you can’t have fish.
Think about it. The definition of “vegetarian” is a person who doesn’t consume meat. The definition of “meat” is the flesh of an animal as food. Fish has flesh. Therefore, fish is meat, and fish cannot be a part of a vegetarian’s diet.
My cite is definitions provided by Google Now.
Thanks for that.
Depends on the recipe. Piper Mince Meat made annually on Stir-Up Sunday definitely contains meat - red, juicy hamburger, cooked up with the fruits.
Exactly. Once I started educating myself and researching to come to my own decisions on how to treat animals as food, I changed my mind completely about hunting and am now OK with it. Factory farming (even of fish), not OK.
Thank you. That’s exactly the point. Now if we can only tell the Catholics that in a way they’ll understand (or at least admit to).
Well, no, because there is no “actual true and standard” meaning. Language does not itself contain any essences. There is no law of the universe saying that the letters “m”, “e”, “a”, and “t”, placed on the page in that order, mean one thing rather than another. Hence, it is of no particular significance whether Catholics describe their Friday meals as “not eating meat”, since everyone knows that “meat” in that context includes beef but not fish.
Make sense?
I agree that “vegetarian” by default means no animal flesh, including fish. Not that I like bringing up the dictionary definitions, but look at the definition for “vegetarian” here.
Or let’s check the UK Chambers Dictionary:
This implies that in the vernacular, meat and fish are distinct as two separate categories. I really don’t know what the fuck all this has to do with Catholics, as I would say most English speakers make this distinction.
Most (many) English speakers may indeed make that “distinction”. But it takes special ones to actively argue that fish is NOT meat. I’ve had two occasions that I recall (one recently) - probably more - where it’s come up that someone I’ve known (Catholic) talked about eating fish on a Friday. Then, when I pointed out that, in fact, they are still eating meat - only a more limited family of meat - they completely denied and wouldn’t accept that, in the purest sense, it’s still meat.
What their religion is really saying isn’t that fish is not meat. Only that you can’t eat any meat on Fri. EXCEPT for fish. Why? Who knows. Apparently god cares about that sort of thing.
Oh, and back to the OP and others who are befuzzled by the Catholic differentiation between meat and fish. It was explained to me thusly, in my lapsed Catholic memory back to the 80’s - Something about the most recent Pope’s decree (sometime in the 1900’s) being to abstain from carnis during the times calling for abstinence. The Latin carnis refers specifically to land animals, while the English meat refers to all flesh.
So obedience to the Church goes back to the literal translation from the Latin, which does differentiate between animals from land or water. I’m not saying it truly makes sense. It might even be one of the many parts of why I dropped the whole of all churches from my life.
Anyway, didn’t Catholics make up a large part of the population at some point? I wonder if the differentiation in common language stemmed from that, because people had to start including and fish when mentioning meat, so the religious crowd would fully understand, and it just became pervasive in order to prevent misunderstanding. Which, in turn, is starting to create misunderstanding in and of itself, to have to phrase meat and fish together.
Well, it’s more than just except fish. The prohibition is against mammals and birds. Therefore, you can have turtle, frog legs, bugs, etc., on Lenten Fridays (but I’d wager most Catholics don’t know that.) And, yes, AFAIK, it comes from the fact that the prohibition is against carnis, which corresponds to a sense of the word “meat” in English, but not the general sense meaning “flesh of any living creature.” Also, you might find it interesting to note that animal fat (used as a condiment or for cooking) is even okay during Lent. Don’t ask me…I didn’t make the rules.
He sure does!!!
Hey, once again, if you eat fish infected with Heterosporis, it’s technically no longer meat.
I’ve been reading this thread trying to get a handle on the OPs point, and it’s dumb as hell.
So, the OPs beef is that we don’t refer to all animal flesh as “meat”? Really? That’s fucking it?
Get the fuck over yourself. American English is one of the few languages where it might be an issue.
Guess what? We have a perfectly good word for animal flesh. It’s flesh.
Like a bazillion posts have just pointed out, meat usually refers to the flesh of only certain animals. Just like “Americans” is understood to mean people from the US, no matter how much mouth-breathing pedants want to claim it can mean people from virtually anywhere in the Western Hemisphere.
If you want a general word, use the word flesh, you dolt! No chance of being misunderstood then.
OP: “Dang. My best gotcha, wasted!”. 
Once, at university, I saw half a dozen descriptivist linguists viciously beating up one single prescriptivist.
Someone asked me: “Aren’t you going to help?”
I answered: “Nah, they’re six guys, they’ll manage just fine on their own.”
No argument here.
However, I can somewhat understand the frustration, since my own learning of English has caused me some frustration and given laughable moments to me and mostly to others about me.
Not just English has this stupid issue, Google translates Fruchtfleischinto flesh.
I commonly here people referring to the flesh of fruits…. Here’s one
Yes, like tourists from the USA call an black guy here in Ireland “African American” … - No, you fucking idiot, he’s African!
A Black guy from the USA for me (and most others) is an US American – we don’t give a shit what you call your people yourselves.
He might be a dolt, but sadly flesh does not work either – fucking English and the use and meaning of words changes all the time.
Enjoy 
And not, confusingly, Black Irish. 
I think the worst example of that I ever saw was someone referring to Australian Aborigines as African-American. Wrong on both counts :smack:
Yeah, the Irish pastry skin is easily confussed with dark skin…
Yup!
Thanks for both giggles
This thread is offal.