Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, toxicity and dog-whistling are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !uspolitics@lemmy.world
7) No Hit-and-Run questions.
Please don't delete your post for no apparent reason. If you plan on deleting a question later, say so in the post, or if you feel that you have a good reason to remove it, message a mod beforehand. It's not fair to the ones who took their time to answer, and it's not in the spirit of the community.
8) No Bots.
Posts or comments from bots, LLM's, AIs, Neural Networks, Transformers, or Marvin the Paranoid Android are not welcome in AskLemmy. Real humans only please.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
We surrender language to scientific/other detail oriented pursuits too easily.
According to some, a raspberry is not a berry, but a pumpkin is. That's dumb. The word berry existed before botanists tried (and failed) to determine exactly what it meant, and the original meaning is still way better/more useful than the botany one.
So here it is: a berry is a small fruit, which is usually sweet, and usually edible. Raspberries, blackberries, strawberries, cherries, grapes, gooseberries, currants, and blueberries are all berries. Pumpkins, watermelons, tomatoes, zucchini and bananas are not.
Other terms that have been co-opted this way include "work", "salt", and "rock". I believe the fields stealing these terms should be forced to come up with their own, different words.
Force them how?
And it's not like the other meanings of those words have been erased. I don't even think the scientific uses are used more commonly than the every day ones.
And if someone "corrects" you just say you weren't using the scientific term and they can fuck off with their useless contribution. Or say "hmm" and continue what you were saying if the previous instructions would be destructive to your way of life.
By using the degree of force suitable to something inconsequential. Occasional public mockery ("This guy things a watermelon is a berry!") or miffed letters to the editor come to mind.
My level of involvement is to continue to talk about it occasionally when the opportunity presents itself, and hope that someone that isn't yoked by the field of computer science (and therefore incapable of naming anything) will propose a name for at least one of these things.
I like this take!
I cope by just being a little extra specific when I can find the words to do so, like calling out botanically squash are fruits and mushrooms are fungi, while culinarily they work as veggies.
That's way jargon is. If a field uses too much jargon, it raises the bar for entry unreasonably high. Instead of having a decent but imperfect understanding of something, you have no understanding.
As a recovering physicist, the jargon we come up with is absolutely terrible. In lieu of that we name things after people, or multiple people, or sometimes a composite name of jargon and people, which seems to me worst of all.
Technically correct is the stupidest kind of correct!
I was with you until you called grapes a berry. That's just wrong.