• @mhague@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    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.

    • Endmaker
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      176 months ago

      create a website that catalogues all the spiders in my area

      You are a web developer looking for other web developers ;)

    • @Holzkohlen@feddit.de
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      26 months ago

      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.

      • @EtherWhack@lemmy.world
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        36 months ago

        None that I know of. I think the OC was just mocking a bit on how some people can get so bent out of shape when the word is used colloquially.

        • @Username@feddit.de
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          6 months ago

          Funnily there is also the word “Mitgift” (Dowry) that has nothing to do with poison at all and is closer to the english “gift”.

        • ✺roguetrick✺
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          6 months ago

          Same root though. In Dutch it wasn’t differentiated until recently so the same word has vastly different meanings between Afrikaans and Dutch. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/gifte#Middle_Low_German

          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.

          Same meaning as dose in that sense. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/dosis#Latin

          • @samus12345@lemmy.world
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            36 months ago

            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.

      • @MrPoopyButthole@lemmy.world
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        16 months ago

        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).

        • @mhague@lemmy.world
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          36 months ago

          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.