4 ms·
None. A “toxin” is a naturally occuring poison, such as snake venom. The word you're looking for is the umbrella term “toxicant”. See: https://en.wikipedia.or
by MrVandemar 3y ago
None.
A “toxin” is a naturally occuring poison, such as snake venom. The word you're looking for is the umbrella term “toxicant”.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxicant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxicant
But, pendantry aside, pretty sure a lot of those plastic toys, especially the sort of rubbery squishy ones, are probably loaded with pthalates and other exotic and interesting things.
- gremlinunderway 3y agothis is pretty pedantic alright. For better or worse and as much as lots of people wanted to push back against it, you're just going to have to accept that "toxin" has become a general term now no longer tied to just naturally occurring poisons. Words evolve, they change with use. It's like the people dying on that pedantry hill over "literally" being now used in slang to just mean "a lot / really significantly" rather than "how something appears in literature". I'm sure there were people equally complaining about the death of the English subjunctive verb [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_subjunctive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_subjunctive
- MrVandemar 3y agoEqually, should we not value the richness and vibrancy of the language? Should we not strive for accuracy and precision? Or do we want to pare down the language to some banal Orwellian Newspeak, drained of vigour, designed to make the possibility of interesting and original thinking impossible? Anyway, “Toxicant” is a perfectly cromulent word.