As someone who is frequently pedantic I sometimes sit and hypocritically brood on which unnecessary pedantry from other people annoys me most I've decided it's people who try to draw a distinction between the word "possum" and "opossum"
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This is the same as why pedants insist that the "American buffalo" is not actually a buffalo at all but merely *named* for the "true buffalo" (the African buffalo and the Asian buffalo/water buffalo) and instead should always be called a "bison"
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Even though it's pretty damn obvious the Americans who regularly interacted with this animal and saw it as something of a national symbol called it a buffalo! That's what it says in the song! It's where the buffalo roam!
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Where is the city of Bison, NY? Who has ever eaten a bison wing? Has anyone ever exhorted the Bison Gals to come out tonight and dance by the light of the moon?
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I think the important point being neglected here is Australian possums are adorable and the American ones suck, so you guys should just use the O.pic.twitter.com/TIkhJNPaeQ
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Somebody years ago imported the aussie possum to New Zealand. There are no natural predators and the possum has become one of the biggest ecological disasters of our Nation. On the upside NZ crushed COVID19. We are virus free thanks to our Governments plan.
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The irony of this part is that, particularly if writing in a field that requires specific terminology, the language used is actually less varied than general speech explicitly because of that specificity.
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Technical documentation, for example, works best when you use consistent phrasing even across a wide swath of doc. So linguistic pedants of this stripe might believe they’re preserving linguistic diversity, but they’re actually constricting the language.
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This rarely happens even in specialist fields. Consider the many meanings of “category” in mathematics. There are disambiguations for most of them, but they’re rarely used when gesticulating at a crowded white board.
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