Let's compromise and call them both fish.
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2025
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Everything is a fish. Why not?
Counterpoint: there's no such thing as a ghoti
Reminder that according to the actual rules of English orthography, “ghoti” can never be pronounced as “fish”, because said rules feature “position within a word/syllable” very prominently. An onset g simply can’t be pronounced the same way as a final gh, and in fact, any “gh” followed immediately by a vowel must be pronounced with the hard /g/ sound. “ti” is only ever allowed to fricitize to the “sh” sound if it’s followed by another vowel. Ghoti can only be pronounced the same as “goatee”, and English speakers know this intuitively even if they can’t articulate why they know this, the same as we internalize hundreds of other language rules without knowing that we know them.
Reminder you cannot take a prescriptive approach to English, it can only be viewed descriptively.
There are is no ‘correct’ way to do anything beyond what its speakers say at the time of observation.
This IS the descriptive approach. Trying to wrangle fish out of ghoti is simply not how people read.
The pope approves
Pescatarians had it right
Do you secrete milk from mammary glands?
Bc that's like legit the only requirement. We set the bar low. Not like those elitist avians.
I was always taught live birth was also one of the requirements. Are there any other exceptions besides platypus?
Echidna also lay eggs.
That's right!
They also have really weird penises if I recall
Well, you have to be descended from a particular branch of the evolutionary tree that has the ability to secrete milk from mammary glands. If, say, a mollusc independently evolved milk production that wouldn't make it a mammal.
They wouldn't independently evolve mammary glands, because only mammals have mammary glands, and they are not mammals, but mollusca.
I'd say that's a bit of a chicken/egg situation, but I don't think we need to bring in more classes.
And then the platypus pulls out this bad boy
The semi aquatic egg laying mammal of action
M'lady.
M'Perry
The M’platypus
Categorizing dinosaurs as birds is pointless, anyway. Categorizing birds as extant dinosaurs... now that is much cooler.
I prefer my birds to be fish.
Is there anyone arguing against dinosaurs being birds anymore? This was still a relatively new thought to the general public when Jurassic Park came out, but IIRC, it was pretty well accepted among paleontologists even back then. More people try to badly argue that Pluto is a planet than try to say dinosaurs aren't birds.
This is the other way around. There are some who want to push back the definition of "bird" to include more dinosaurs via earlier divergence. There are even a few that argue that certain conventially non-avian dinosaurs are actually from the agreed bird lineage but converged back on a bipedal dinosaur shape.
Is it not the other way around? Birds are dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs are birds.
I believe that, nowadays, it is generally accepted that dinosaurs, crocodilians and birds are all "archosaurs". In a similar way to how Australopithecus, Humans and Chimpanzees are all "hominids".
All the remaining dinosaurs are birds though...
You do see it sometimes, where people complain that dinosaurs are no longer fearsome giant lizards because we found out that they might have feathers and aren't SUV height, on social media and places.
It generally becomes obvious that they have never met a goose, chicken, or been at risk of swooping before.
I know of such a man. Makes a convincing argument too, that I'll be wholly unable to properly articulate, but my dumbed down understanding is that (in addition to other things) the "feathers" could be decomposed collagenous fibers from the skin of dinosaurs rather than true feathers, and we're not actually sure even though feathers are the pushed theory. And he also doesn't believe in flight evolving ground up, but rather trees down, basically not from creatures jumping away from predators but from them gliding away to another tree. His theory being that one actually works well to get you away from predators while the other would be less likely to be successful and more likely to get eaten before passing on the genes. Also something about the Yi qi.
Idk if he's right, but tbf idk if the other people are either, who knows.
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As an Old, I appreciate this Wife Bad humor.
Aww, poor soyjak, are you upset nature doesn't adhere to your imaginary grouping made up before you had as much knowledge?
stings a bear to death