"Bees' nest"?!!! WTF!!!

[Wilson Gray]

On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 5:25 PM, Ronald Butters <ronbutters at aol.com> wrote:
> It is not easy for me to imagine a situation in which calling a "bee" a
> "wasp" (or vice versa) would be unclear or confusing--maybe in a legally-=
> valid contract? ("I will and bequeth my bukkake film collection to
> Lawrence Horn; except that if I die of the sting of a bee, the =
> collection goes instead to the Duke University Department of English").
>
>
> And, again, while there may be exceptions in scientific taxonomy, in
> almost everybody's English, it seems to me, "bee" is the only hypernym for
> "wasp" "hornet" "honeybee" "bumblebee" that doesn't include mosquitoes.

Wow! I find that to be absolutely amazing!

Well, that's a variant of the same phenomenon that induced a native
speaker of Czech to ask whether, in English, there is a distinction
between the stressed vowel of _whipping_ and that of _weeping_. If
there's no distinction that you can discern, then there's simply no
distinction that you can discern.

Who can argue with that? In my case, there is no random, colloquial
hypernym that can gather all of those names into a single set. Do you
have such a one for butterflies and moths? How about horses, mules,
and ponies? Dogs, wolves, jackals, foxes, dingoes, and coyotes?

OTOH, if the claim is merely that, for those who have a hypernym, that
hypernym is "bee," I have no comment.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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