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Comment by quotemstr | Hacker News Reader

> Calling a pterosaur a dinosaur is an error of the same order of magnitude as saying that our species is a marsupial

I'd say it's more like the error of calling a tomato a vegetable. While it's true that from a phylogenetic perspective that pterosauria aren't dinosaurs, they still have many basal characteristics (relative to today's flying dinosaurs, the aves) that give them a certain dinosaur-like quality in the imagination. Besides, they're contemporaneous with the true dinosaurs. Grouping them with the dinosaurs is understandable. The grouping is incorrect under one classification scheme, but correct under another.

BTW: this site screws up copy and paste, appending marketing junk to any text copied to the clipboard. I wish it were possible to prohibit these clipboard shenanigans.

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Tomatoes are vegetables. And yes, I see there is a comment lower down that tries to point out that tomatoes are fruits. But guess what, they're not mutually exclusive. That is because fruits are a scientific term, and vegetable is a common or culinary term. From Wikipedia:

"Vegetables are parts of plants that are consumed by humans as food as part of a meal. The original meaning is still commonly used and is applied to plants collectively to refer to all edible plant matter, including the flowers, fruits, stems, leaves, roots, and seeds. The alternate definition of the term vegetable is applied somewhat arbitrarily, often by culinary and cultural tradition. It may exclude foods derived from some plants that are fruits, nuts, and cereal grains, but include fruits from others such as tomatoes and courgettes and seeds such as pulses."

That makes sense to me. But, how about mushrooms? Do people consider mushrooms to be vegetables, or are there three different over-arching categories of food, meat, vegetables, and fungus? I'd argue that distinguishing between vegetables and funguses isn't very important, and that it'd be safe to lump all funguses into vegetables for purposes of food. I don't know if that's typically what's done, however.

If there's going to be three categories, I would think meat, seafood, and vegetables (including funguses) would be more useful than going by scientific kingdom.

Seafood is meat, and mushrooms are their own thing (like a vegetable but not)

People are strange and inconsistent. They name things without knowing their full history, and then those names sometimes persist well after they are known to be incorrect.

Mushrooms are not vegetables; they are fungi. Fish are vegetables, as long as they have scales and fins.

> I wish it were possible to prohibit these clipboard shenanigans.

It is in Firefox, at least:

  about:config 

  dom.event.contextmenu.enabled = false

  dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled = false

Great tip!

Thanks!

Besides black6's solution, my alternative is to use developer tools to copy the text directly from the DOM tree.

Tomatoes are vegetables under any classification scheme.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/is-a-tomato-a-frui...

Nope, tomatoes are technically fruits, though they are commonly considered vegetables.

Just like pterosaurs are technically not dinosaurs, but are commonly considered to be in our culture.

> tomatoes are technically fruits

Tomatoes are quite obviously fruits. Most of the industrial tomatoes are tasteless because they're harvested well before they're properly ripe, but a ripe tomato harvested at the appropriate time is obviously (and tastes like) a fruit.

It's almost as if vegetable is an overly broad (and as such not particularly useful) designation in the common lingo, much like dinosaur ;)

How is this related to what I said? Fruits and vegetables are not mutually exclusive.

Fruit is a botanical classification (at least the way you're using it) whereas vegetable is a culinary one.

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