But then you invite, potentially, the absurdity of a gorilla as a “giant monkey”. Or how about this: Gigantopithecus, the largest primate ever to have lived, was a giant monkey that lived in East Asia.
One may apply the principles of descriptive grammar to a question strictly of grammar or usage. But the misapplication of nouns to the natural world is just wrong, and no amount of collective ignorance can make it right.
Still it grates intensely on anyone who is properly aware of the difference.
Well then, allow me to correct your ignorance by pointing you to the dictionary, which states that an implication that an ape is never a monkey is incorrect. Me, I’m more flexible than that.
So are you saying that all fruits are vegetables?
Are all Seed bearing “Vegetables” are also technically Fruit?
On the Nutritional level, the breakdown appears to be:
Grains and Potatoes are Starches
Traditional Fruits, Melons & Tomatoes are Fruit. (Maybe Eggplants & Peppers)
Carrots & Beans are Veggies. (But Beans are would be fruit by the definition you have above )
I guess none of this makes sense.
Finally, Curious George is a Chimp who is called a monkey the way a 5 year old would call a Chimp a monkey?
Tomatoes, interestingly, have flavor compounds that make them taste more like meat than like other fruit. There’s a culinary reason why they’re classified with vegetables (which more often appear in savory dishes) than with fruit (which more often appear in sweet dishes).
By a botanical definition, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, green beans, and a bunch of other things are all unambiguously fruits. By a culinary definition, all of those things are unambiguously vegetables. This is not a problem, since nowhere in any definition of “fruit” or “vegetable” is the stipulation that the two categories are mutually exclusive.
Back to the original topic (or at least, closer to the original topic), I think that George is a bit too small to be a chimpanzee. His size, proportions, and face all seem more monkeyish to me. Given the fact that he also lacks a tail (which I had somehow never noticed before), I’m going to have to say that he’s a Barbary ape.
And finally, I might point out that in a recent Superbowl ad (surely an indicator of popular American cultural usage), a group of corporate chimpanzees is repeatedly referred to as “a bunch of monkeys”.
So a Tomato which was traditionally called a Vegetable, is now considered a fruit and is technically both, and nutritionally a Fruit but Culinary wise is a vegetable.
Is that about right?
I could see that applying to eggplant as well, probably the most often substituted vegatable {fruit} for meat.
Look, I didn’t intend to suggest ignorance on your part because I’m sure you know the technical difference between an ape and a monkey. But an ape is not a monkey. I wouldn’t throw a fit if someone confuses the two in a very casual or humorous setting, or if the speaker is too young to understand the difference. But in any context where the speaker or writer is expected to express himself or herself correctly and accurately-- if they call a chimp a monkey it’s going to cast doubts in my mind about how well informed and well educated they are. Given the usual standards we try to maintain in GQ, I consider this to be one of those settings.
When you quoted post 16, you quoted the dictionary link to Merriam-Webster. Did you not read the link? (You have to type in “monkey” once you get there to see the definition).
I understand you want to maintain high standards. The point is, you need to correct your own misapprehension to do so. Not all monkeys may accurately be called apes, but all apes may accurately be called monkeys; if you think less of someone who does, it is because of your own ignorance, not theirs.
To the OP again. If you saw the movie Forrest Gump you saw Curious George. That was the book young Forrest had near the beginning of the movie, and that his son was looking at while waiting for the bus, near the end of the movie.
Agreed. I get filled with righteous fury (and a teensy bit of smugness) when people on TV call chimps “monkeys”. While I’m not particularly a stickler for precise and exact categories, I agree that it’s abusing the general idea of linguistic descriptivism to accept “monkey” as a descriptor for an ape. Further, I suspect that the popular confusion is mostly due not to people considering chimps and monkeys to be the same thing but rather because many people simply don’t have a clear enough idea what monkeys and chimps are like. Chimps don’t look all that much like most monkeys; anyone who’s actually spent some time at the zoo will know the difference. This is not a matter of tiny subtleties, after all.
You’re still confused. This is not a matter of “traditional” versus “modern”. “Fruit” is a term that has a specific definition in botany. A fleshy body containing seeds is, botanically speaking, a fruit.
“Vegetable” is not a term with any particular definition; one might reasonably call any part of a plant a vegetable - fruit, leaves, stems, and roots are all consumed as “vegetables”. But then you run into the troubling problem of whether, say, oatmeal counts as a vegetable.
The term “fruit” has two definitions - a botanical one, and a culinary one. The culinary definition refers to botanical fruits that are predominantly sweet or sour in flavor. The term “vegetable” has no real definition. None of these things are exclusive. Tomatoes are botanically fruit but culinarily not so; they are certainly vegetables. Likewise for green beans or egg plants or peppers or cucumbers or squashes or pumpkins or peapods. Both definitions of “fruit” are perfectly reasonable, and they can coexist just fine. But the botanical definition is by no means particularly recent or modern.
Why? Because it says so in the dictionary? I’m surprised to see you simply accepting a dictionary’s authority on what’s okay and what’s not okay to say. Why does it become acceptable the minute it’s enshrined in a heavy book by a lexicographer? I don’t understand this attitude from people trying to explain why “nuclear” ought to be pronounced a certain way or “very unique” is a solecism or anything else; I certainly don’t understand why you would resort to the “because the dictionary says so” argument when it agrees with you, when I’m fairly certain I’ve seen you argue (and rightly so) with people who had the dictionary on their side.
As a biologist who knows very well the technical difference between monkeys and apes, I’d support the position that “monkey,” in causal usage, can be used to refer to both. I do it myself, and it certainly doesn’t particularly grate on me to hear others do it. And I would also point out the non-technical definition of ape - a higher non- human primate without a tail - includes some animals that are actually monkeys, such as the Barbary Ape and Celebes Ape, which are tailless macaques.
If “monkey” was originally used in English to refer to both monkeys and apes, and if “ape” was originally used to refer to both apes and some kinds of monkeys, I don’t think that the later co-optation of these terms by scientists for restricted technical senses should preclude their continued use in the non-technical senses.
I get particularly irritated by pedants who insist that the word “bug” is properly used to refer only to insects of the order Hemiptera. “Bug” was used in English to refer to any small crawling critter long before entomologists came along. There is no reason why the later restricted entomological definition should be the only one considered to be proper.
No connection. There were actually two versions of what was essentially the same movie: *Jag är nyfiken - en film i gult *(1967) aka “I Am Curious (Yellow)” and Jag är nyfiken - en film i blått (1968) aka “I Am Curious (Blue),” about the sexual and political explorations of a young woman. The film(s) were made in Sweden, and the colors refer to those of the Swedish flag.
I believe the only scientific definition of vegetable is opposed to Animal or Mineral (or Protist). So that would mean all fruits are vegetables. The distinction between fruit and vegetable is, IIRC, based on tax classifications.
Then there were the Curious George titles we made up when I worked at a library.
Curious George Gets Hit By A Truck.
Curious George Visits a House of Ill Repute.
Curious George Eats Some Bad Oysters.
Curious George Gives the Man in the Yellow Hat a Social Disease.
IIRC you’re an ornithologist, not a primatologist, but even so, would you use the word ‘monkey’ that way in a professional context?
I was going to mention these two animals. They are apes in the same way that a citrine topaz is a topaz, which is to say that they have only a somewhat superficial ‘apishness’ about them, being tailless and fairly large, but otherwise are run-of-the-mill monkeys. They’re built like monkeys and they move like monkeys. The fact that their common names evolved to include the word ape IMO underscores the fact that apes and monkeys are fundamentally different, or else they we’d be saying Barbary or Celebes monkey.
To be completely honest, it must be mentioned that over the last forty years or so there has been a growing consensus among specialists that the ape clade must also include humans, so the notion of apes as a taxonomic group including the gibbon, orangutan, chimpanzee and gorilla, but excluding humans, is pretty well obsolete. I don’t expect everyday speech to change so that humans are conceptually included as apes; yet I still just can’t see calling a monkey an ape or vice versa. I’m not a professional in the field, as most here probably know, but I’ve spent a lifetime reading and learning whatever I can about it. Perhaps I’ve been looking at primates for so long I’m more aware of the differences at a subsconcious level.
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