dhru1999 said:Personally, i don't like people calling my star a turtle. I see it as calling a human, a gorilla. please vote
It's not like calling a human a gorilla. It's more like calling both humans and gorillas "primates," which we are.
Sea turtles, pond turtles, and tortoises are all in the order Testudinides, and as a group are commonly called chelonians or turtles. Tortoises are turtles - they happen to be the type of turtle that evolved 50 million years ago to live full-time on land and eat mostly plants.
I don't correct people when they call tortoises "turtles" because they're not wrong. I call my tortoises "turtles" all the time.
Kerryann said:It does irritate me too. I am going to call everyone's cats pumas and everyone's dogs dingos.
Again, it's not a taxonomic error, merely a more general term. House cats are from a different species than pumas, and dingos from a different subspecies than domestic dogs, but all are in the order Carnivora. Therefore, you could call all of these animals "carnivorans," and be quite right about it.