Seen this a lot in internet arguments; for example ‘Actually, it’s a square not a rectangle’ - the object being discussed may indeed be a square, but squares are rectangles; so it’s both. Sometimes it goes the other way :- ‘Actually, its a rectangle, not a square’, when again, its both.
That’s an example I haven’t personally witnessed (but I believe it probably has happened). Examples I have seen in the real world include:
It’s not poison, it’s venom. Yeah, venom is poison. Certainly there is a technical distinction between ‘venomous’ vs ‘poisonous’, but less so with venom vs poison and certainly untrue to say venom is not poison.
Its not a vegetable, it’s a fruit - this one is especially weird because sometimes the thing being described isn’t a fruit, if you wanted to get technical (which I think is what people are trying to do with these nitpicks) - for example apples are not true fruits, and this variety of nitpick is plagued by inconsistency of scope - ‘fruit’ and ‘vegetable’ mean different things to botanists and to cooks anyway.
It’s not a turtle, it’s a tortoise is one I have seen recently (tortoises are turtles) - again, this is a scope thing because turtle and tortoise are non-intersecting sets in most colloquial contexts, but not in zoology.
What examples of these nitpicks have you seen and why are they wrong or right?
I recall Blockbuster advertising No More Late Fees and then patiently explaining to irritated customers that, no, see, this is a fee that you pay for returning it late, but it’s not a “late fee.”
Mention “Freon” on the internet and you’ll be told that freon is a brand of refrigerant. To which I’ll agree, but continue to use the word ‘freon’ because it’s faster to type. These are all from this board:
1st my nitpick. There is no such thing as Freon. There are Freon brand gasses. R12, R22, R410a and so forth.
A refrigerant (Freon is a brand name…
I’ve never heard R-410A referred to as Freon though… All that said, this is just a pedantic argument. Colloquially Freon is used to refer to all refrigerants
These are both replies to someone that used the word freon:
Low ‘freon’ would cause freezeups…
The “freon” in your air conditioner
And here’s a footnote from one of my posts:
*Freon=refrigerant, I always trip over that word and freon is easier to type a bunch of times.
At the campus Jewish center where I used to attend Friday night services, the organizer would always announce for newcomers that it was customary to remain silent between saying the blessing and eating the challah - at which point one of my more outspoken classmates invariably shouted “It’s not a custom, it’s a law!” Fine, but unless you live in a theocracy, what would you call the act of observing that law, if not a “custom”?
When we first started dating, my wife used to say “orientated” and I corrected her to say “oriented”. She claimed to be grateful for my correction and said in a subsequent job interview that it helped her to describe herself in proper English as “goal oriented”. Not long after that though, I learned not to correct small grammatical errors of hers if I knew what was good for me
But I’ve since learned that British usage of the word, apparently, is “orientated”. And if anyone knows proper English, it’s the English, right?
I’ve tried to coin a somewhat related fallacy of “I know a thing”; where, because someone knows a fact about some topic, they think it must always apply and be important, when it may actually be irrelevant or even misleading.
Example 1
Seeing someone drawing or depicting a yellow sun, and “correcting” them that the sun is actually white.
But of course the sun frequently appears yellow to us – heck you can only really look at the sun when it’s yellow/orange/red – and we draw things how they appear to us.
Example 2
The wiki on blood vessel ultrasound made a point about how the convention of displaying oxygenated blood as red and deoxygenated blood as blue is wrong, because this is the opposite way to how Doppler shift works (in most images the arterial blood is actually moving towards the sensor…this is all IIRC).
Of course, how Doppler shift works has little to do with conventions on how we display different kinds of blood. We might just as well argue that the convention of red and blue water taps is wrong because it goes opposite the way black body radiation works.
Yeah, I’ve encountered something like that on occasions when I have described certain things as ‘very sour and bitter’ - people (usually rudely) asserting “Well, which is it? It can’t be both because sour means acid and bitter means alkaline”
Whilst it is true that some alkaline things taste bitter, there are other things that also taste bitter, besides bases. "Go taste some marmalade’ is my usual reply.
I don’t think this rises to the level of a Sovereign Citizen belief, but a lot of times you’ll see advice to the effect that, when you’re talking to a cop, it can be a great idea to ask “am I being detained?” Because, hey: there are times when you aren’t, but may mistakenly think that you are! So: keep asking, if you don’t get a yes-or-no answer! Because you can leave, if the cop says “no!”
And, if you ever feel like watching bodycam videos for a while, you’ll eventually see someone getting arrested — and, as the handcuffs go on around their wrists behind their back, they’ll ask: “am I being detained?” And the answer given is a flat “yes.” And the person being arrested, as if still looking to establish that they’re allowed to walk away, will again ask: “am I being detained?”
Similarly to tortoises being a kind of turtle, toads are also a kind of frog.
Which is made worse by the fact that the flag that usually gets called the “Confederate flag” is actually a battle standard. In other words, flying it means not just “I hate the US”, but “I hate the US so much that I, personally, am going to war against it”.
It doesn’t mention oxygenation at all. It just says that in some parts of some veins blood flows away from the heart and in some parts of some arteries blood flows toward the heart. That means that if a lab displays arteries as red and veins as blue, some arteries will appear to have vein parts and vice versa. I think that’s the contradiction.
But, like, why? I find it pretty easy to distinguish cetaceans from fish. I don’t think of them as fish.
