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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Replying to @arthur_affect
Mine was always "It's not a boat, it's a ship."
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Replying to @jayonaboat @arthur_affect
Q: What's the difference between a boat and a ship? A: A boat captain doesn't care if you call it a ship, a ship captain cares if you call it a boat. (Granted, unlike possums, there are actual legal & logistical reasons to care about the distinction. Possums, probably not.)
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Replying to @zer0jack @jayonaboat
There's this whole complicit history with how submarines are always called "boats" rather than "ships", even though modern submarines are huge and have people living on them for months at a time
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The rule in the Navy is that "boats are launched from ships", and in the old days a submarine had to be carried to sea by a ship to be deployed, so submarines were by definition boats
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The only way for a submarine to be upgraded to a "ship" is to itself carry boats, which no submarine can do despite how big they've gotten, because of the whole underwater thing
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Anyway it's a silly distinction, especially since they still call the crew supervisor on a Navy ship a "boatswain"
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Subs also have a Chief of the Boat, and if you think they're gonna update their biz cards...
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