Moscovitz

My previous blog made me realize I don't remember junior high school very well. Shocking. I wanted to use terms derived from the biological classification system. I talked about my and my baby's "humanness" so I tossed around terms like mammal, primate and human somewhat haphazardly, as I am wont to do. I had to look up (online, which felt like cheating) the correct info to refresh my memory. One thing I didn't recall is that the word human isn't even on the chart. Actually we are homo sapiens. Maybe human is the vernacular version of that.

Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. That's a lotta bananas.

So the words I wanted to use are as follows:

Mammal, which is a Class.

Homo sapiens, a Species.

Primate, an Order.

There is something close-sounding to human - Hominidae - which is a Family. But that is certainly not supposed to equate to human, being that it is two steps up from Species. I guess that before you get to Species, you're covering a large swath of living beings, with a lot of both similar and very different characteristics from us.

I will strive to be clearer in future discussions.

My niece and I were just talking about the fact that the reason why we build our vocabulary is to have more clarity in communications. That way people actually understand you. But scientific vocabulary is not something I have ingrained well. Perhaps I'm better at conversational and musical language usage.