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Comment by maxglute | Hacker News Reader

When I was young, not knowing who Jane Goodall was, I was dragged into lunch by event planner who showed her around Beijing, and wondered why this lady was talking about chimpanzees so much. This was the year the Nokia released Snake, I remember getting enamoured/distracted by her monkey talk and lost a near perfect snake run.

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Well, technically apes don't have tails, monkeys do, so the chimpanzee talk would be an ape talk. Learned that from her too

In the same sense that "there's no such thing as a tree" or "there's no such thing as a fish", there's"no such thing as a monkey".

... unless you include apes.

Monkeys are just the simiiformes minus the apes. That's just a paraphyly, which is totally fine.

If you don't like paraphyletic labels for aesthetic reasons, just include the apes to make it monophyletic. The main reason we don't is that many people have strong, visceral reactions to being called a monkey.

You can't do that to fish or trees without including a bunch of things that are obviously not trees and fish.

"If it doesn't have a tail it's not a monkey, even if it has a monkey-kind-of shape. It if doesn't have a tail it's not a monkey; if it doesn't have a tail it's not a monkey: it's an ape."

With the one exception being Curious George.

Yeah but his tail was amputated, my neighbour had a cat without tail, bitten off by a dog or something, it's not that uncommon.

Perhaps the 'curiousness' of George was not his personality trait, but rather the curious affliction of his missing tail.

Sorry for your loss.

The snake game or her death?

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