this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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Science Memes

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submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 months ago (1 children)

If "poisonous" are parallelograms and "venomous" are trapezoids, "toxic" would be quadrilaterals in general. (Can't use square/rectangle analogy, because squares are a type of rectangle, and venom/poison is not a type of poison/venom.)

Aside from that, there aren't too many rules on "toxic".

Poison and venom will both cause serious acute injury with the possibility of immediate death. Both can be considered "toxic".

Just to be confusing, "poison" and "poisoning" can have substantially different connotations. For example, the heavy metal "lead" would not normally* be considered a "poison". Lead would generally be considered "toxic".

But, repeated exposure to lead to the point that it causes physical symptoms is referred to as "lead poisoning".

Same thing with mercury: it would be considered "toxic"; it wouldn't normally* be considered a poison. But repeated exposure to mercury would be considered "mercury poisoning".

(* If a third party were to deliberately introduce lead or mercury into the body of an individual, the substance would then be considered a "poison".)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Thank you for your thorough explanation.

It's always a bit confusing when your language has one word for something another language makes distinctions within.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Bro, look at "かける (kakeru)” in Japanese. It's a verb with a bajillion different meanings depending on context. Kill me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

I thought it couldn't be that bad but as I was scrolling it just keeps going

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There is a lot of pedantry in English despite there being no central governing body over the language like French has.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Yep!

Personally, I'm deprecating "its".

The "its/it's" distinction requires violation of the apostrophe-s rule for possessive forms. This exception to that rule is entirely arbitrary. The meaning is never ambiguous in context; the distinction exists solely to enable pedantry and confuse spell checkers.

So, English will be better off by retiring "its", relegating it to the trash heap along with "chuse".

"It's" is now a homonym. Both the contraction rules and the possessive rules for apostrophe-s construction are maintained, and the only people who will cry about it are English teachers and other worthless pedants.

I have spoken.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

1000002686

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

On the contrary, what if we bring back 'tis?

'Tis good!