Whales are tetrapods, which evolved from lobe-finned fishes, so cladistically they are fish. And so am I. Bloop bloop bloop!
Intelligence is knowing whales are fish. Wisdom is not putting a whale in a fish salad.
I had a whole deleted other paragraph in the OP about how everyday language isn’t beholden to strict scientific nomenclature, in which I mention tomatoes specifically. A chef probably doesn’t care about the exact botanical definition of “fruit”, and is more concerned that tomatoes pair well with savory foods like other vegetables do, so forcing the distinction in this case would only confuse things.
I know I’m also undercutting my own joke, but calling whales (and humans) “fish” in the cladistic sense, while true, is also not very helpful.
As far as I’m concerned, culinary terminology will never override scientific definitions. The full phrase should be “tomatoes are used like a vegetable because of their relatively lower sugar content” rather than “tomatoes are vegetables”. To me it’s like someone living out of their car and calling it a house. Sure you live there and you do things in there that you would in a house, but that’s still a car at the end of the day.
Experience is knowing Muktuk is delicious and works on a salad if cut small enough.
In a break from the long tradition of grouping all fish into a single class (Pisces), modern phylogenetics views fish as a paraphyletic group that includes all vertebrates except tetrapods.
Your Honor, I wanna present evidence in defense of OP:
Exhibit A: In Dutch language the creature is called “walvis”, in which the syllable “vis” translates directly to “fish” in English.
Exhibit B: The scientist Stephen Jay Gould concluded, after a lifetime studying marine life, that “fish” do not form a single genus, nor are they all closely related to one another, and that there is no single evolutionary ancestor exclusive to all species traditionally called fish. This implies that the term “fish” is not a scientifically coherent category, and therefore any aquatic creature could, in principle, be labeled a “fish”.
I rest my case.
Your mom is a whale.
Fish is not a real classification.
Monke is fish.
You Honor I wanna present evidence in defense of OP:
Exhibit A: In Chinese Language it’s 鲸鱼
Literally has the character “鱼” in the word, the 鲸 character also has the 鱼 radical built into the character.
I rest my case.
So it’s a double fish!
1.5 fish, the radical only takes up half of the character
That’s pretty fishy.
By that logic all life is just self replicating organic chemicals.
If whales are fish, then so are coelacanths.
