Nomenclature

Image by Ollie T. via Flickr

A system or set of terms or symbols especially in a particular science, discipline, or art. 1

The classification of items sometimes varies by the system being used to classify. I wrote a post that include a teacher who marked a child wrong for saying a tomato was a fruit. The problem in that story is that there are two system to classify a tomato.

The first system is that of science and the parts of a plant. In that system, a tomato is a fruit,. a carrot is a root, and broccoli is a flower. Each is a part of a plant.

I suspect the teacher wasn't thinking about that system when she marked the student wrong. Instead she was thinking of another system: food groups. She might have even taught a lesson on food groups. In that system the tomato wasn't a fruit instead it was a vegetable. While that system is less precise in its divisions, it was nevertheless a valid system. Most of us can divide the things I listed above as well as others by the same set of rules. Fruits are sweeter and have more simple sugars. Vegetables don't have a lot of sugars. Starches are plant parts that include more complex sugars. Finally, oils are extracts of plants that contain pure fat (and are the only category that can also include animal products). Unlike the plant part system this one has no clear dividing lines and some items are sorted differently depending on who's doing the sorting.

Children mostly grow up figuring out hundreds of these informal classification systems. Is a color green or blue? Is that a bird or an insect? What's the weather like? In many ways they are much more advanced scientists than us adults who don't have to sort all of life into categories because we have already excepted those divisions of life.