I'm a bit doubtful of Wright's claim here that people only think zero is neither even nor odd only because they've been told so. I think a lot of people just d

I'm a bit doubtful of Wright's claim here that people only think zero is neither even nor odd only because they've been told so. I think a lot of people just don't like edge cases and want to exclude them. Now zero isn't really an edge case for parity, but someone who's not too used to thinking about zero might just consider it as an edge case generally (possibly even thinking of it as only sort of a number -- remember, people took a long time to accept zero as a number!), especially if they're thinking more in terms of whole numbers than in terms of integers. Hell, I've noticed that even a number of mathematicians will exclude zero or the empty set (or other such trivial objects) from definitions even when there is no reason to, even when there's no edge case there. Sometimes zero or the empty set really is an edge case an acts differently, but most of the time it doesn't, and yet a number of mathematicians will exclude it anyway just because, IDK, they never really got comfortable worthing with the empty set, I guess.