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

[Jonathan Lighter]

Now I will sort things out.

Some speakers apparently don't distinguish between bees and wasps
unless they have to, and most may not be able to articulate the
differences clearly or coherently.
I imagine that "wasps look more like ants and have a wasp waist" is
the usual basis of discrimination.

Many, many speakers, however, being confident of the distinction,
nevertheless automatically prefer "bee" when the distinction doesn't
matter or when they haven't got a good luck at the buzzing evildoer.

A familiar phenomenon.  Cf. our long-ago discussion of "soldier" vs.
"Marine."  (Though in that case perhaps a smaller proportion of
speakers can articulate a distinction).

JL



On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 11:06 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Bees' nest"?!!! WTF!!!
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 6:50 AM, Damien Hall <D.Hall at kent.ac.uk> wrote:
>> I do seem to remember being confused by the larger usage for 'bee' when I first went to the States, and possibly not in a good way, as I'd be much more comfortable going close to a bee=honey/bumble bee than to a bee=wasp.
>
> You're a better controller of yankspeak than I, Damien. Prior to
> seeing some of the responses to my post, I had no idea that there
> truly were native speakers of any variety of English who considered
> the distinction between _bee_ and _wasp_ to be empty of content. When
> I noticed that cartoon characters didn't make the distinction, I
> thought that it was a mere WTF? Who expects that an animated cartoon
> is necessarily going to be mappable onto reality?
>
> And, while I'm at it, what's up with the anti-sexism monitors who say
> nothing about the fact that male bees - rightly known as "drones" -
> wasps, ants, etc., which do nothing beyond the insemination of the
> queen, are routinely given all of the credit that should redound to
> the females of the species?
>
> I once had a roommate who didn't see any reason to distinguish between
> ants and newly-hatched cockroaches. Well, he had a point, I reckon. No
> one wants to share an abode with either of these pests. So, what does
> it matter?
>
> --
> -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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