FishFace

Hmm yes

I believe would be an engine topper

The interpretation here depends on the idea of a word-vector. This is a component of language models which treat each individual word in a language as a vector in a pretty high-dimensional space (how high is up to the model author). The way this is usually described is that if you look at the word pairs "man - woman", "boy - girl", "king - queen" and so on, they should differ by a similar vector in word-vector-space, and that vector should correspond to the concept of "male" (or "female" depending on which way round you do it). If you have a word vector model, you should then be able to take the dot product of this gender concept-vector with a word like "actress" or "actor", and see if it has learnt that "actress" is female and "actor" is kinda male but kinda gender neutral due to changing usage.

So what this diagram is showing is a measure of similarity between various word vectors. Those vectors are (the vector of) a slur minus a related word. The idea is to see if subtracting "Mexican" from "spic" leaves you with an underlying concept of "slur" that corresponds to these other vectors - just like with gender and man, woman; boy, girl, etc.

The confusion matrix is actually pretty interesting IMO. There is pretty high similarity between all of the "racial slur - race" vectors, and much less between "cunt - woman" and "fag - homosexual" and the others. So it's showing that there isn't that good a concept - in this word vector model at any rate - of "slur" in general, but you could argue pretty strongly that racial slur does exist in that way.

I once met a Chinese girl who was somewhat suspiciously fond of the English slang term (that I hadn't heard of) "Jap's Eye" which apparently means "urethral opening" and tbf I would never use the latter term either...

OTOH I had heard the term from time to time and it always came across to me (not Japanese - important caveat) as a pretty mild one, like "frog" for the French. I would be very unsurprised if it were different in the USA though, where there was such a big impact from WW2 and internment.

Shit, is ploughing a girl less environmentally friendly?

I guess there's a serious risk of a baby which is like the least environmentally friendly thing possible

Glub glub

It's not wrong at all. If you look up "berry" in the dictionary the first definition will most likely not be the botanical one.

But everything else you described as learning is all about language and the sociology of science, not facts about fruit itself.

What underlying fact does that teach you? Only that botanists categorise fruits a certain way. Learning that word doesn't teach you anything about bananas, does it?

Pluto lost its planethood with great fanfare, to the extent that most people at least vaguely know that happened. As such, there's not much confusion when someone refers to Pluto as a dwarf planet or the eight planets or whatever.

The planets are also something which people essentially only encounter as science. You don't go to the supermarket and buy a planet, you can't go and spot some in your local river or whatever. The nearest would be being able to point out Mars or Venus in the night sky.

This is unlike fish, reptiles, fruits and berries, etc. And it's different from my personal least favourite example of this kind of pedantry: poison. Unlike venom, which is basically just a scientific term, poison and poisonous is an everyday term.

Science needs precise terms in order to do science properly. But that doesn't mean that scientists - or more often those interested in science - need to enforce those precise terms on everybody else.

Who is "we"? It certainly isn't most people. It's like these interminable "no such thing as a fish" bollocks. Or "AcKsHuAlLy bananas are berries OHOHOHOHO."

Keep that kind of jargon for your academic articles. In pop-sci contexts like here, it's not unreasonable to use, but it deserves a health warning because of the intersection of audiences. Insisting that there's only one correct usage is insufferable.

Fish, interestingly, aren’t a real thing in terms of formal classification

This is misleading. Formal classification existed for a long time before phylogenetic classification became the standard.

Reptiles, as traditionally defined and therefore as usually meant, do not include birds or mammals. It's a paraphyletic classification (of which there are boatloads).

Mammals, Birds and therefore non-mammal, non-bird amniotes (reptiles) are class-level classifications, as are insects and arachnids.