...Kinda like how "woman" doesn't need a strict definition either. :)

So, if you're going to call old & new world monkeys both "monkeys" but demand we exclude apes - what does monkey even mean?

The simple answer is that - like the British turtle, tortoise and terrapin - it has fuck all to do with science & is just a descriptor of primates that look like monkeys.

So back to damn monkeys... There's two groups of "monkeys" - old and new world. They split millions of years ago. Then apes emerged and split from old world monkeys much later.

These two groups of "monkeys" are less related to each other than apes are to old world monkeys.

And yet Brits will correct others for calling box turtles ...turtles, because they have legs and are tortoise-shaped. But those are not tortoises. Tortoises are a specific group of turtles. Turtles is the group name (well, the common word anyway) for the lot of them.

It doesn't help that between regions or languages, animal names can be more or less specific. In British English for example, the word Turtle exclusively means the kind with flippers. All land walkers are tortoises, the half n half kind are terrapin. Nothing to do with science - this is language.

A lot of people forget that many names of animals and plants are based on some vague similarity noted hundreds of years ago. And so, they don't realise many common animal names are not about some absolute genetic truth and species get moved around groups all the time.

It's not just fdr. One of the things the epa did not long after it was formed was document the nation's pollution via photography. That can seem frivolous, but generations of Americans have no idea why the EPA was necessary. This broke a million views when we published it in 2017