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Comment by VoodooJuJu | Hacker News Reader

We refer to them as plastics because it's meaningful and useful to do so in most contexts, including the context of the harm they do. Whether that harm is done during manufacturing or ingestion is irrelevant. They're all plastics and they all cause harm.

It's not useful to nitpick over their long chains or oxygen double bonds. That rhetoric contributes nothing but deflective nerdery and confusion to the conversation.

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As we become more interested in the relatively new information about these materials, different kinds of conversations are occurring than we've had in the past. To facilitate these new interests, it's entirely possible that some of the more specific terms could/should/will become part of the household or water-cooler vernacular. BPA already has.

> deflective nerdery

FWIW, the point about carbon bonds was actually a response to nerdery that's already present here, in a forum intended for digging into the nerdy details of various subjects.

"Plastic" is not actually a useful or meaningful term. E.g. if scientists made perfect artificial skin that was atom for atom identical to your skin it would be mostly made of plastic.

Not all "plastics" cause harm (at least, not any more than the skin you shed every day).

If you go up to someone in the street, and tell them about the plastic in the water supply and food they eat, how it's harming them, and that we need to better clean it up and regulate it, they're going to understand exactly what you're talking about, and they won't get into a debate with you about whether you're talking about dead skin, artificial skin, or BPA.

They won't understand, they'll just think they do. Just as if you talked about the dangers of "chemicals" and how dihydrogen monoxide kills thousands of people a year.

I've seen countless disagreements on numerous topics caused by people thinking they both have the same definition of a term and even more instances of confusion because the intuitive implicit definition that came from the example usages they'd seen of a term was a non-representative subset of the things matched by the explicit definition.

Nuance and clarity of language matters, otherwise you'll ban "chemicals" and discover you actually have no sane definition of it and are inflicting a lot of unnecessary suffering.

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