Another on My List of Dislikes
A third to add to my list of pet peeves--sloppy use of language under two categories: (1) general--using nauseous for nauseated, continuously and continually, imply and infer, etc. With the most skilled writers, these lapses are generally few. (2) technical. And I cite as my example here one from Philip Roth's Exit Ghost . There is a small scene in which he describes the mating of box or snapping turtles (I forget which) in the course of which he refers to these reptiles as amphians. NO! They may be facultatively amphibious in habit of life, but they are not amphibians/class Amphibia, they do not obligatively live part of their lives in water (that is, they don't start with gills and eventually develop lungs.) They don't reproduce in the water and they are not frogs, toad, newts, salamanders, or caecilians. Indeed, they are tetrapod amniotes. Why should this bother me as much as it does? For those who understand these things, they are dist...