A question asked on the quiz show Q.I. that I saw recently has me puzzled.
For those unfamiliar with the show, host Steven Fry asks questions then penalises the guests if they give the obvious but wrong answer
“Name a saint that came from Ireland”
“Saint Patrick.”
Lose 10 points. St Patrick was a Roman, who was sent to Ireland. He didn’t come from there.
Anyway, the question was similar to :
“What eats clothes”
“Moths”
Minus 10 points. Moths don’t eat clothes, only the larvae do.
Me-> :dubious: but surely the word “moth” means the creature itself, throughout it’s life cycle. It’s a moth as a larva, it’s a moth when it pupates, it’s a moth when it spreads its wings. Isn’t it?
Am I wrong here? Does the term “moth” properly refer only to the adult form? If I’m wrong, is there an alternative term that describes the creature at all stages?
Dunno - it looks a bit dicey, but yes, generally speaking, the term ‘moth’ describes the adult form (in the same way that a butterfly is distinct from a caterpillar, a frog is distinct from a tadpole and a seed is distinct from a tree). I’d imagine this is because the terms are descriptive of the form rather than the type.
It’s a bit of a linguistic rather than a scientific issue. I would say that most people would probably not consider a moth egg, or a moth larva, or a moth pupa, to be an actual moth. Of course, they are all the same organism in a scientific sense; but they aren’t the same thing in a linguistic sense.
QI is careful to phrase their question just so Alan Davies always says the wrong answer. But they have been known to make mistakes. On their DVDs the writers quantify some of the “questionable” answers they have been challenged over, and some of them that sound wrong are actually technically right, and some are in fact wrong after all.
It has always seemed odd to me that a mayfly is said to live for just a day, when it lives (in a different form) for a year or so underwater. I understand the distinction **Colibri **is making, however.
I’d say that “Moths” was a correct answer. A Moth is a Moth is a Moth. A Moth baby/larvae is still, certainly, a moth, and it’s thelarvae that cause the damage, not the adults.
So, with clothing, moth damage, by definition, means damage in the larval stage. That’s when that happens. Seems to me that parsing it in terms of adult stage is, um, not so accurate as to what people observe as necessary to deal with detrimental
damage.
For all practical purposes, to say that Moths do the damage is accurate.
That would have been correct, with “moth” modifying “larvae” … in the same sense that a chicken egg is different from a robin egg. But “moth” by itself is incorrect.
I don’t think it’s a bad way to think. The info above abut ‘moth’ oiriginally meaning the larva is interesting, but in modern usage, the term describes the adult form. nothing wrong with having a word that describes something.
The problem only arises if people mistakenly think all descriptive terms work in the same way. Which of course they simply don’t.