• norimee@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    As a non native English speaker, where does toxic fit into the poisonous/venevenomous question?

    • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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      2 months ago

      If “poisonous” are parallelograms and “venomous” are trapezoids, “toxic” would be quadrilaterals in general. (Can’t use square/rectangle analogy, because squares are a type of rectangle, and venom/poison is not a type of poison/venom.)

      Aside from that, there aren’t too many rules on “toxic”.

      Poison and venom will both cause serious acute injury with the possibility of immediate death. Both can be considered “toxic”.

      Just to be confusing, “poison” and “poisoning” can have substantially different connotations. For example, the heavy metal “lead” would not normally* be considered a “poison”. Lead would generally be considered “toxic”.

      But, repeated exposure to lead to the point that it causes physical symptoms is referred to as “lead poisoning”.

      Same thing with mercury: it would be considered “toxic”; it wouldn’t normally* be considered a poison. But repeated exposure to mercury would be considered “mercury poisoning”.

      (* If a third party were to deliberately introduce lead or mercury into the body of an individual, the substance would then be considered a “poison”.)

      • norimee@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Thank you for your thorough explanation.

        It’s always a bit confusing when your language has one word for something another language makes distinctions within.

        • Jake Farm
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          2 months ago

          There is a lot of pedantry in English despite there being no central governing body over the language like French has.

          • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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            2 months ago

            Yep!

            Personally, I’m deprecating “its”.

            The “its/it’s” distinction requires violation of the apostrophe-s rule for possessive forms. This exception to that rule is entirely arbitrary. The meaning is never ambiguous in context; the distinction exists solely to enable pedantry and confuse spell checkers.

            So, English will be better off by retiring “its”, relegating it to the trash heap along with “chuse”.

            “It’s” is now a homonym. Both the contraction rules and the possessive rules for apostrophe-s construction are maintained, and the only people who will cry about it are English teachers and other worthless pedants.

            I have spoken.

    • ulterno@lemmy.kde.social
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      2 months ago

      Toxic can be used to refer to something that will slowly damage the body in some way.
      e.g. tobacco smoke, which doesn’t kill you right away, but slowly turns you into a zombie, by destroying your mental ability and cause faster ageing.
      Another, is Lead (Pb), which lead to the destruction of the Roman empire.