Lol what? Is this Marco Rubio’s publicist? Anyone who still believes Rubio is competent at this point hasn’t been paying attention at all.

Let’s dispel with this fiction that Marco Rubio knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t know shit about what he’s doing.

Yes, you’re correct but that’s why I said it was a “working” definition. When you’re a botanist (like many of my former professors) you still use the word vegetable in discussion. They would often teach us about local plants with indigenous uses using plain language like “the Chumash used the leaves of this plant as an important part of their vegetable intake”, rather than using some clinical term like “edible plant matter” or whatever.

I was only saying in these contexts, they definitely wouldn’t describe fruits as vegetables because fruit are a specific thing to a botanist. They definitely wouldn’t describe fungi as vegetables because they are also a specific thing to a botanist (not relevant 😂)

So in a scientific setting the word vegetable is still used, but it is mostly defined by what it’s not!

Great post, with one caveat

the closest thing to a definition we have for “vegetable” botanically is “literally all plant life and maybe also some fungi,”

I got my degree in Ecology and Evolution, and we always used a similar working definition but it was “edible parts of a plant which are not fruit.” So basically botanically, stems, roots, leaves, flowers, and all subvarieties of those are vegetables. Fruits are fruits. Fungi are fungi.

Sociopath is not a clinically defined term. Sociopath is basically a slang term for a person with anti-social personality disorder (ASPD). ASPD can be one part of a psychopathy diagnosis but they are not the same thing.