Science Memes

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submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Are some spiders poisonous? Are all animals that are venomous also poisonous? Also I'd like to say that there is no linguistic difference between the two in some languages. There is no distinction between the two in German for instance. It's either giftig or it isn't.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (2 children)

It's an unfortunate false friend that the German word Gift means poison in English.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Funnily there is also the word "Mitgift" (Dowry) that has nothing to do with poison at all and is closer to the english "gift".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Same root though. In Dutch it wasn't differentiated until recently so the same word has vastly different meanings between Afrikaans and Dutch. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/gifte#Middle_Low_German

Original meaning seems to be something that was given. So a snake would gift you Poison just like snot nosed brats would gift you a cold during Thanksgiving dinner.

Same meaning as dose in that sense. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/dosis#Latin

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

The word has been used as a euphemism for "poison" since Old High German, a semantic loan from Late Latin dosis (“dose”), from Ancient Greek δόσις (dósis, “gift; dose of medicine”).

I wondered how the heck it got that meaning. Pretty strange to apply a term for giving something in general to poison specifically.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

None that I know of. I think the OC was just mocking a bit on how some people can get so bent out of shape when the word is used colloquially.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

There is a distinction to make. For example some snake venom is not poisonous when traveling through your digestive system, and only becomes a problem when it enters the blood stream (usually from a bite).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I don't think it matters in most contexts. When people are casually talking about it, venomous and poisonous are both stand-ins for "it has venom." They're not telling other people, "actually, don't eat spiders." I was just joking about the classic pedant line about spiders.

But it does make a difference on paper. I'm curious how you would express this in German: A black widow is venomous and in theory a healthy human can eat a dead black widow with no ill effects.