This pushes one of my buttons. A rock lobster is not a type of lobster IN TERMS OF BIOLOGICAL TAXONOMY. Taxonomy is not reality. It's a convenience. It's a way of classifying organisms for a specific purpose by privileging certain similarities and relationships while ignoring others. There's nothing wrong with that. It can be quite helpful. But there's nothing ultimately right or true about it either.cosmos wrote:A rock lobster is not a type lobster. The clue specified "does not have claws" and everyone knows that lobsters have claws and that can't be correct. The response was wrong even the category did not have "rock" in quotes. You can't be more specific if you've already named the wrong family of crustacean.
This particularly drives me nuts when Science or The Law or whatever appropriates an ordinary English word and then tells us we're wrong if we don't use that word in their new specific way. It is not, e.g., wrong to refer to an act as "murder" when it's "technically manslaughter" unless one is trying to make a legally technical point.
Depending on the clue, it may or may not be relevant that marine biology does not classify a rock lobster as a type of lobster. In this case, had the "rock" not been in quotes, a BMS would have been completely warranted.
