Telling someone to drink less beer and study more is wild.
Academics in general have a long history of being alcoholics or alcoholic adjacent
There are three types of academics, ones that are addicted to alcohol, ones that are addicted to caffeine, and ones that are addicted to both.
(For health reasons I dont reccomend both at the same time)
I’ll never forget my proffessor that just slammed monster and chain smoked cigarettes during fieldwork.
I only saw him drink water once. It was about 115 (Fahrenheit) and he took a single sip of water from a nalgene before putting it away.
Am an academic, can confirm
I am in 1st year of college, I don’t drink, and I am failing.
Heavy drinking is considered irresponsible through your bachelor’s. After that it’s considered “networking” and “building professional relationships”. With the implicit usage as a coping mechanism
If you’re not joking, reach out to your college’s academic support/tutoring centers. They’re literally paid to be there and help you with your classes. Even if you understand all the class content already they can still help you with whatever you’re struggling with, like figuring out how much time a project needs or how to get it started/organized.
I struggled my first go ‘round in college 20 years ago and wish I’d known that, now that I’m going back I’ve been using the support systems the college has a lot more and it’s been paying off.
*fewer beer XD
Screw you! I drink what I want. (And can stop at any time)
Enjoy your bug light! =D
Akshully I think it’s either “less beer” or “fewer beers” (plural).
To build on this, this usage is called a non-count noun. Less beer, less water, less air, less sand, etc. all refer to non-countable quantities of some substance. Beer could be counted, if referred to by some metric (“one glass of beer,” “24 ounces of beer”), same as “a bottle of water,” “one tank of air,” “a truckload of sand.”
Which is all to say that you’re right. “Less beer” makes far more sense than “fewer beer.”
they kinda drink them actually
And they drink Bug Lite when they’re concerned about their weight.
why would they drink Bug Lite when they’re concerned about their weight? i assume you mean they’re concerned that they have too little weight
He’s saying bug lite is a low calorie drink for dieting spiders
Ok but “bug” has multiple meanings, and almost nobody means “hemiptera” when they say it. More commonly, it’s any terrestrial arthropod. Arachnids are bugs. Centipedes are definitely bugs.
Heck, there’s a broader definition that basically includes all arthropods. “Moreton bay bugs” are a popular food this time of year. And they’re a kind of lobster.
terrestrial arthropod
i’d like to differ
Crickets in cheeto dust taste fine…soon in a 7/11 near you 😛
You’re already eating bugs, in fact the FDA has so-called “food defect action levels”, which define the acceptable levels of food “contamination” from sources such as maggot and insect fragments among other things (best not to think too hard about it) in your daily food.
I make a point of referring to birds as “feather-bugs”, much to the weary resignation of my RL friends.
the birds and the bugs
i don’t actually know why it’s called “the birds and the bees” (am not american, never had it in school) but i suspect it stands for the big and little flying things?
We don’t really know where the phrase came from. My guess is that they’re things from nature that alliterate, which makes it sound cute and innocent.
Birds, mostly males, get all flashy and showy to attract a mate, and bees all answer to the matriarch of the family, so it’s just like life. Obviously.
Maybe the saying came from the mirror universe…
uh, slugs are bugs! any non-vertibrate animal is a bug
uh, slugs are bugs
I’mma be honest, I would not instinctively agree with this.
I suggest “bug” applies exclusively to chitinous invertebrates.
I’m trying to square my instinct that
- snails aren’t bugs (because they’re squishy without the shell) with the feeling that
- crabs are bugs (because they’d go tap-tap if you tapped on their exoskeleton with a finger) but
- hermit crabs aren’t bugs if they’re in a shell but are bugs if they’re naked
Snail shells aren’t chitinous.
Crab shells are chitinous.
Hermit crabs are only partly chitinous, and the shells they use are not chitinous.
Hope that helps
I would. I think that just goes to show how informal and unworthy of policing the term is. We even call viruses bugs a lot of the time.
The ocean is quite literally lousy with sea lice. They’ve even got rolly-pollies down there.
Not just roly-polies, but Rollison J. Pollimagnussons:
Unhand at once me you filthy dry-skinned ape!
What in the name of Cthulhu is this?
Its an adorable isopod
Rollison. And he is a rather pleasant dude.
Here’s what they look like full-grown:
Where I live, the definition of a bug is super liberal to the point of absurdity.
But even that’s been topped a few times over the years. When I used to be active on Reddit, I would participate in the “bug” identification sub. It wasn’t frequent, but it also wasn’t all the uncommon for folks to show up asking for ID on reptiles and amphibians, even remember that a shrew (or maybe it was some other small mammal) was posted once.
It wasn’t that big of a surprise for me. I used to work retail decades ago and I remember a customer who returned a bag of salad greens because there was a bug in it. The “bug” was a very small baby frog (just out of tadpole stage) – likely some kind of tree frog.
“Bugs” even refers to errors on computers. Funny how the pedants don’t go into computer forums and berate the coders for using “bug” incorrectly.
Because it comes from a literal bug that messed with a computer.
Rattling off insect classifications while a simple pun goes over you’re head is a great demonstration of the difference between knowledge and intelligence.
*your
Yeah, but I’m not fixing it, you big dumb bitch.
I’m not big.
That was at least 3x funnier than it should have been.
Well done.
*yro’ue
God, what a big, dumb bitch.
Name checks out. He may have prions in his brain…
“Bug” is a folksy word for any invertebrate with 6 or more legs. For example, they call lobsters and crayfish bugs.
many people call slugs, snails, and worms bugs too. So any invertibrate with the right vibes
So there is no such thing as a bug, in the same way that there is no such thing as a tree
It’s a feature
i sometimes call anything an insect that’s smaller than a small rabbit or lizard (depending on the mood of day) and has no spine. it’s colloquial use
bug is typically something that stings, while insect is more generic.
Well no but yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hemiptera
Hemiptera (/hɛˈmɪptərə/; from Ancient Greek hemipterus ‘half-winged’) is an order of insects, commonly called true bugs, comprising more than 80,000 species within groups such as the cicadas, aphids, planthoppers, leafhoppers, assassin bugs, bed bugs, and shield bugs. They range in size from 1 mm (0.04 in) to around 15 cm (6 in), and share a common arrangement of piercing-sucking mouthparts.[3] The name “true bugs” is sometimes limited to the suborder Heteroptera.[4]
But wasps can sting and they’re not bugs. They can also bite. So the key part is piercing with their mouth. For true bugs (as in the biological sense)
i said typically, and colloquially. literally zero people refer to hemiptera specifically when they say bug. if you look at the american heritage dictionary, that’s the exact order used in the definitions:
#bug
/bŭg/noun
-
An insect having mouthparts used for piercing and sucking, such as an aphid, a bedbug, or a stinkbug.
-
An insect of any kind, such as a cockroach or a ladybug.
-
A small invertebrate with many legs, such as a spider or a centipede.
American
Very ethnocentric of you. I first heard it from Stephen Fry, so no, not literally zero people.
Also, it’s literally the first definition there. That’s the definition of the species in hemiptera. Just because you don’t know anyone who knows orders of animals in latin doesn’t mean we don’t exist.
I for one always enjoyed reading taxonomy, especially because sometimes translating a species can be quite weird if you don’t know the translation and have to essentially hope that the yellow-breasted warbler is the thing they also described it as in the other language. Sometimes it’s another feature.
But I’m sure you’d know roughly what I mean if I refer to the order of primates. Possibly the infraorder cetacean as well. Especially if you’ve watched Star Trek religiously.
Stephen Fry on Insects, and the beauty of nature and Evolution
That’s the wrong clip but i can’t be arsed to find it
-
Transcription
Three Tweets, each replying to the previous.
By “you’re right, i’m wrong” @OkBu…:
what kind of beer do spiders drink? bug lite
By “Mentally Healthy” @EAT_ROAD…:
bad joke, spiders are not bugs only insects of the order hemiptera classified as bugs and spiders aren’t even insects. maybe if you drank fewer beer and spent more time studying you would know that but it’s your life
by “you’re right, i’m wrong” @OkButStill:
they eat bugs you big dumb bitch
Good human.
The ancestor of all of us, animals, bugs and plants. So we eat always our parents-
I am sick of the portion sizes at fancy restaurants. This μm of deconstructed food is overpriced.
Sometimes calling someone a big dumb bitch is the only appropriate course of action.
Does “bug” have a technical definition? If so then it’s news to me and everyone who uses it to mean pretty much any small invertebrate (or microorganism, or software defect).
Well, I guess that bugged him.
Usernames DO NOT check out
Neither usernames check out
In Australia the spiders don’t eat bugs, they mostly eat low flying birds and posties
Is it also true that the kangaroos steal all the women too with their statuesque muscles?
Death island*
Hard mode irl
Aren’t spiders insects?
No. Insects have 6 legs, spiders have 8.
Are they in some separate category?
Yes, they’re arachnids.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachnid
Both insects and arachnids are arthropods.
They’re separate biological classes.
So they’re about as far apart as you are from a reptile, bird or fish.as far apart as you are from a reptile
That would mean…not very. Reptiles are an extremely broad and diverse group, containing everything from penguins and crocodiles to tuataras and pythons. Mammals are the most closely-related extant clade that is generally not considered “reptile”, to reptiles.
Arachnids, on the other hand, are more distantly related to insects. Crustaceans form their closest relatives, followed by myriapods (centipedes & millipedes). Only then do arachnids appear.
Reptiles … penguins
Hold on…
Yup. Birds are reptiles! If you want to define a monophyletic clade that includes crocodiles and lizards, there is no way to do that without also including birds. To define a clade, you take the evolutionary tree and make a “cut” somewhere on it. Everything below that cut is part of the same clade, you can’t selectively remove some branches but not others, unless it’s by changing where you make your single cut.
So in this diagram:
The green circle notwithstanding, you would usually define reptile as a cut at the “C” on the diagram. You could put the cut at Lepidosauria, but that would mean crocodiles and turtles are no longer considered reptiles either.
A more zoomed-in look would show that after crocodiles and birds branched apart, you also get another branch where pterosaurs branch away from dinosaurs, and that birds are one of many branches and subbranches of dinosaur.
That’s fascinating… I knew birds had been linked to dinosaurs for a while but hadn’t given much thought to the implications… I just thought it meant dinosaurs were being reclassified as not reptiles…
I really appreciate the info and the way you laid it out. Just curious, is that knowledge part of a hobby and/or career? Or was that like just one of the random tidbits you picked up somewhere?
Reptiles, as traditionally defined and therefore as usually meant, do not include birds or mammals. It’s a paraphyletic classification (of which there are boatloads).
Mammals, Birds and therefore non-mammal, non-bird amniotes (reptiles) are class-level classifications, as are insects and arachnids.
Sure, but we’re having this conversation in 2025, after phylogenetic classification has long since taken over as the way we describe the relations between species.
Birds are unambiguously reptiles.
Mammals are not reptiles, but are the most closely-related animals to them.
Who is “we”? It certainly isn’t most people. It’s like these interminable “no such thing as a fish” bollocks. Or “AcKsHuAlLy bananas are berries OHOHOHOHO.”
Keep that kind of jargon for your academic articles. In pop-sci contexts like here, it’s not unreasonable to use, but it deserves a health warning because of the intersection of audiences. Insisting that there’s only one correct usage is insufferable.
Not exactly. Humans, birds, and reptiles are all within the phylum chordata, while arachnids and insects are both within the phylum arthropoda.
Fish, interestingly, aren’t a real thing in terms of formal classification. The term is similar to bug in that we apply it to whichever creatures we feel fit the description.
Not exactly. Humans, birds, and reptiles are all within the phylum chordata, while arachnids and insects are both within the phylum arthropoda.
But all fish, no matter which classification you use, are also part of the phylum chordata, just like reptiles, birds and mammals. @[email protected]s statement still holds true.
Fish, interestingly, aren’t a real thing in terms of formal classification
This is misleading. Formal classification existed for a long time before phylogenetic classification became the standard.
Pluto used to be considered a planet, but I’m not going to tell people it is one today. Pisces as a class was abandoned due to the realization that we were mistaken about how similar/related they are to each other. Whales used to be included in pisces.
Pluto lost its planethood with great fanfare, to the extent that most people at least vaguely know that happened. As such, there’s not much confusion when someone refers to Pluto as a dwarf planet or the eight planets or whatever.
The planets are also something which people essentially only encounter as science. You don’t go to the supermarket and buy a planet, you can’t go and spot some in your local river or whatever. The nearest would be being able to point out Mars or Venus in the night sky.
This is unlike fish, reptiles, fruits and berries, etc. And it’s different from my personal least favourite example of this kind of pedantry: poison. Unlike venom, which is basically just a scientific term, poison and poisonous is an everyday term.
Science needs precise terms in order to do science properly. But that doesn’t mean that scientists - or more often those interested in science - need to enforce those precise terms on everybody else.
Even when they pretend to have 6?
Or when 2 legs fall off?
