All good my dude… It didn’t make sense to me on my first past either so I figured that it might have gotten you in the same spot too. Just glad to see the community is not throwing down votes at ya anymore, because your comment just felt like an honest misread. Cheers.
Anyone know what the first known case of ‘bug’ exclusively referring to Hemipterans/Heteropterans? The first use of bug being applied to arthropods was in the 1620s in reference to bedbugs (in Hemiptera but not Heteroptera) with the term ladybug (not in Hemiptera) first attested in the 1690s. Both predate Linnean taxonomy. So why and when did entomologists decide to coin this highly restrictive definition? It’s a very English-language term so it surely wasn’t when the taxon was created by Linnaeus.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure taxonomy is in latin because actual scientists got tired of dealing with pedantic dipshits.
“Bug” is an english word so it’s the domain of an etymologist not a biolgist. My lookup of the word indicates applying “bug” to arachnids is perfectly cromulent.
Thanks, I didn’t realize the server instance I log in with, could do seamless censorship on the fly like that for content it doesn’t even host. Does that mean there is lemmy content I’m just not seeing ? That’s unacceptable.
Yep. If your instance defederates from certain instances that others don’t defederate from, you won’t see comments from those defederated servers that others might still be able to see and interact with. This is the curse of a decentralized system where every node can make up their own rules.
Can I just run my own single user lemmy server instead ? Why do I even need a third party to manipulate my digital world view ? Will I get autobanned from everywhere for being too small ?
I’m not a scientist, but I’m the kind of person to keep black widows as pets and create a website that catalogues all the spiders in my area. I’d allow spiders being called bugs, or even insects. Even poisonous is alright but it does hurt a little.
Are some spiders poisonous? Are all animals that are venomous also poisonous? Also I’d like to say that there is no linguistic difference between the two in some languages. There is no distinction between the two in German for instance. It’s either giftig or it isn’t.
There is a distinction to make. For example some snake venom is not poisonous when traveling through your digestive system, and only becomes a problem when it enters the blood stream (usually from a bite).
I don’t think it matters in most contexts. When people are casually talking about it, venomous and poisonous are both stand-ins for “it has venom.” They’re not telling other people, “actually, don’t eat spiders.” I was just joking about the classic pedant line about spiders.
But it does make a difference on paper. I’m curious how you would express this in German: A black widow is venomous and in theory a healthy human can eat a dead black widow with no ill effects.
Original meaning seems to be something that was given. So a snake would gift you Poison just like snot nosed brats would gift you a cold during Thanksgiving dinner.
The word has been used as a euphemism for “poison” since Old High German, a semantic loan from Late Latin dosis (“dose”), from Ancient Greek δόσις (dósis, “gift; dose of medicine”).
I wondered how the heck it got that meaning. Pretty strange to apply a term for giving something in general to poison specifically.
It was a Google site (from years ago) so all that’s left is a random archive somewhere. I had all the local spiders+favorites, but the only original content were pictures of Latrodectus and Kukulkania Hibernalis. Beautiful spiders.
Bug is a technical term. Only insects of order Hemiptera, categorized by the ability to fly and the presence of piercing, sucking mouth parts, are considered true bugs.
a: any of an order (Hemiptera and especially its suborder Heteroptera) of insects (such as an assassin bug or chinch bug) that have sucking mouthparts, forewings thickened at the base, and incomplete metamorphosis and are often economic pests
called also true bug
b: any of various small arthropods (such as a beetle or spider) resembling the true bugs
c: any of several insects (such as a head louse) commonly considered obnoxious
“a: any of an order (Hemiptera and especially its suborder Heteroptera) of insects (such as an assassin bug or chinch bug) that have sucking mouthparts, forewings thickened at the base, and incomplete metamorphosis and are often economic pests”
This is the primary and most correct definition of bug.
Yes, people use it wrong. That doesn’t change the definition of the word.
I’m sorry but you’re simply incorrect. Bug can be a technical term, but that doesn’t also preclude it from also being a non-technical term, because words often have more than one meaning. See also: theory.
The scientific taxonomic system was made, in part, because traditional colloquial terms are a mess. For example, “daddy longlegs” refers to a type of spider in my area, but there are two other animals and three plants that it could refer to depending on where you grew up. Taxonomists saw that there are ten different standards, decided to make a new one to replace them all, and for once, it actually worked out for the most part.
“Bug” is one of those old terms. It might have been mapped post hoc on top of the modern taxonomic system, but it didn’t start that way, and isn’t always used that way. I wouldn’t expect an entomologist to use the term at all in formal contexts.
Yeah I always assumed “bug” was like “vegetable” — it’s a colloquial, not taxonomic, term. But there are “true bugs” so maybe the analogy isn’t completely sound.
They’re culinary vegetables. My wife likes to say it like this: intelligence is knowing that a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is knowing that it doesn’t go in a fruit salad.
Everyone loves my tomato/eggplant/pumpkin fruit salad. I bring it to parties, and they all say it looks so good, they want to make sure everyone else gets a chance to eat it. Except everyone says that, and I end up having to take it home and throw it out.
You know you can just put whatever you want in your salsa right, no cop is gonna stop you. I have a very nice mango salsa the other night, it was only one step removed from a fancy fruit salad.
My bio professor basically admitted to us that a lot of that pedantry is pure smugness and nobody cares. Further still, all those names are so complicated because scientists love to try to one up each other on difficult to pronounce and needlessly long latin names.
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