IT'S NOT A BLOODY MONKEY!

'Pedantry is the dotage of knowledge.'
-Holbrook Jackson

I have always had a great love of the natural world. The first books I ever owned were Mysteries and Marvels of Nature, More Mysteries and Marvels of Nature, and The Nature-trail Omnibus, all published by Usborne. From then until the present day I have been buying and reading nature books, and I watch every natural world documentary that I can.

I do not actually know a single person who does not get a bit of pleasure from watching a pride of lions surrounding a wildebeest and ripping it apart for their dinner. Everyone enjoys nature programmes; I just enjoy them a bit more than most other people, and see them as a source of education rather than simply entertainment. Every fact I can pick up from such programmes gets logged away in the jumbled collection of facts that inhabit my brain.

I do (honestly) understand that most people are not interested in being educated by those programmes; that they watch them purely for entertainment. I do not expect anyone to retain every detail the narrator of such programmes passes on. But there is one very simple fact of the natural world about which I cannot avoid getting severely pissed off every time it is ignored or blatantly contradicted: chimpanzees often, continually and infuriatingly get called monkeys. They aren’t. They’re apes.

Apes.

Let me say it again. Apes.

Not monkeys! Apes!

The difference is very simple. With few exceptions, monkeys have tails. Macaques are the only real point of confusion: there are twenty-two species of macaque, several of which don’t have tails, but they are all monkeys. Apart from Macaques, if it’s monkey shaped but doesn’t have a tail, it isn’t a monkey. Chimpanzees, gibbons, gorillas and orang-utans - which do not have tails - are apes.

Easy isn’t it? It’s not complicated in any way, not nearly in the same league of understanding required to recognise the differences between the planet’s thousands of species of insects and arachnids. You don’t have to be David Attenborough to look at a chimpanzee and know that it is an ape, and not a monkey.

There are several other common mix-ups; animals that get defined incorrectly or given the wrong name by uneducated people.

An example is when some innocent soul sees a rook and calls it a crow. While this does irk me somewhat, I accept that the offender might have no great love of ornithology, so I simply, and very politely, point out their misunderstanding to them, and describe the differences between the two species.

All too often this innocent attempt at education is met with open and undisguised hostility, and an accusation of being ‘picky’, ‘pedantic’ (the misuse of which is another matter…), ‘grumpy’ or ‘a smart arse’.

Whenever someone calls a mushroom a plant, I alert them to the fact that fungi, in fact, belong neither to the plant or animal kingdom, but are their own life form with traits in common with both plants and animals.

If someone uses the word ‘seagull’ in front of me I tell them (in the hope that they actually give a damn) that there isn’t actually any such thing as a ‘seagull’, but a collection of birds like the great black-headed gull, the large white-headed gull and the little gull, all of which tend to get miscalled ‘seagulls’.

Those examples cause me a bit of annoyance, and I try to educate the offender whenever they arise. The chimpanzee monkey/ape confusion annoys me much more than any of the other natural world misunderstanding though, simply because of its frequency and repetition.

I get even more annoyed (angry in fact!) when someone commits this sin in front of my children, especially if they are talking specifically to my children and misleading them into believing that the chimp (ape!) is a monkey.

And that is the root of why this aggravates me so much. I want my children to be educated. I want them to understand the world around them. Anyone feeding them false facts is impeding their education.

One morning while taking my son into nursery, one of the other children had with her a cuddly chimpanzee toy. When she showed it to me and told me she had a monkey with her today, I corrected her, and told her it wasn’t a monkey. My wife shook her head at this, in a sort of mildly disgusted way, and said that it didn’t matter if a four year old believed a chimp was a monkey. My reply was to ask her, why then do four year olds go to school? By the time our children are four years old we are enrolling them in formal education. The beginning of any process is the most important stage, the foundation that sets the tone for what is to follow; if we are lax about educating children, willing to allow misconception and false facts into their minds, how can we expect them to embrace proper education?

Education is required for the development of children into sensible, rational and socially useful adults; education that is given to them by their school teachers and the elder members of their family. A child’s brain is a hugely thirsty sponge; always curious and willing to learn, always observing and assimilating, and it is the duty, the undeniable responsibility, of the adults in a child’s life to guide them and pass on as much as possible of their own accrued knowledge and understanding of the world, and to help the child in discovering and exploring all areas that interest and excite them. If children are to learn from their environment, then that environment must be providing truth, real facts, and reliable information.

Someone not knowing something, or not understanding something properly and fully, does not, in itself, annoy me. I know that no one can know everything, and I appreciate that most people do not share my hunger for knowledge. Obviously people are going to make mistakes when they encounter a gap in their knowledge, and that is only to be expected. But people making the same mistake continually, calling a chimp a monkey every time they mention one, even after being told (repeatedly) that it is not a monkey, raises my blood pressure to a level that is dangerous to both my own and their health.

The problem, I think, is apathy. Absolute lack of interest. Lack of interest for one’s own level of education, and for the education of the children around oneself.

I began to realise in the summer of 2006, when a joyous day that I had been eagerly awaiting finally arrived, just how bad this problem is becoming. In Glasgow we have the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. It is one of my favourite places in the country; a building I could happily get lost in for hours (days even, if they’d allow me) and never get bored. This, Glasgow’s finest collection of art and museum pieces, was closed for three years during an expensive renovation and rearrangement. When the doors finally opened to the new and improved museum, I joined the hordes of people flocking in. My first feelings of joy were, sadly, overcome by the frustration and annoyance of having to share the place with hundreds of other people. In the past you could wander round for hours without ever having another visitor closer to you than ten metres. But now it was crammed full of people.

Though it was annoying having to jostle with other people to get in to see some of the exhibits (and having to queue to use the toilet!), I was at first pleased to see that so many people were visiting the place; this degree of interest could only be a good thing, right? Soon however, they started to bother me. What bothered me was the apparent, obvious and annoyingly verbal shows of ignorance and apathy displayed by so many people; people who were there in the company of children.

“Look at the leopard David,” I heard a woman’s voice while I was taking a rest on a seat amid the stuffed animal displays. A leopard? I thought, raising my eyes, unaware that there was a leopard nearby. I must have missed that one! I gazed around myself in a confused state for a while. Then my eyes settled on the woman with the small boy standing before the Cheetah. A plainly and obviously labelled cheetah.

A cheetah…not a leopard!

The next few minutes required the expenditure of a lot (an awful lot) of willpower. I had to wrap my hands under the seat and hold on so tightly that it hurt my fingers, bite my teeth down hard on my tongue until I almost drew blood, force my eyes closed as tightly as possible and picture a peaceful beach with smooth white sand and a gently lapping blue ocean.

Had my willpower faltered even slightly, for a fraction of a second, I would have leapt to my feet, grabbed the idiot woman by the hair, slapped her a few times, and guided her face to within inches of the plaque on the cheetah’s display that identified it, in English (her native language), as a cheetah.

Had the ignorant offender seen the cheetah from afar, or had the plaque identifying it for what it was been absent, and she had mistakenly said “Look at the leopard David” within hearing distance, I would have been tempted to point out her error to her, and tell her that it was in fact a cheetah. As it was however, she was standing right in front of it, and could plainly see the adequately sized plaque. Her mistake was not simply due to a lack of knowledge. It was born of an ignorant, stupid, uncaring attitude. Here she was in the company of a young boy, who she had presumably brought to this centre of education and knowledge so that he could see displays of things that he would not otherwise get to see, to allow him both to appreciate them, and learn from them.

All of the displays in Kelvingrove are clearly labelled, with every exhibit named, and have hundreds of facts and useful, interesting pieces of information placed alongside. If you are at all literate, you can learn a lot during a relaxing wander round the place. If you are too young to read the plaques yourself, you can safely rely on the adults who are with you to read the information contained thereon and relate to you the relevant knowledge about the display you are currently standing before open mouthed and wide eyed in wonder.

Places like Kelvingrove are wonderful, stimulating places. Every room opens to new wonders, round every corner is a new vision, atop every table and in every glass cabinet is a marvel of the world; all gathered together for our education and appreciation. I would love, dearly, dearly love, to be able to wander round that place with the innocence and wonder of a child, to forget that I had seen it all before and to feel that exhilarating rush of wonder as my eyes fall on each new artefact of the world for the first time.

But what is the point of taking your child to such a treasury if you are not going to encourage them to learn from it, to assist them in taking home at the end of the day some small amount of knowledge or understanding of the world that they did not previously have?
Since I became conscious of this, and have been watching for it, I have seen an uncountable number of adults in Kelvingrove walking along behind their children, talking about what happened on Coronation Street the previous evening, or what Rangers’ line-up will be tomorrow, while the children scurry back and forth excitedly. I want to grab them all by the shoulders, shake them thoroughly and shout in their ears “Join in with your children you useless bunch of lazy uncaring morons! F***ing help them to understand it all!”

Even worse than those who stumble along behind blind and apathetic, are those, like the woman at the cheetah display, who make a pathetic pretence of participation in their child’s education. “Look at the leopard David” she said, having seen a large cat-shaped thing with dots on it. A second of interest was all it would have required for her to read the plaque and discover what the stuffed creature actually was, and her son would have left that day knowing something. As it was, he left thinking a cheetah is a leopard. All that he gained from having his mother with him in the museum that day was a lesson on how to be ignorant and foolish.

That woman, and every other person like her, I would happily shoot. Our children have a better chance of learning and growing up to do something useful and fulfilling with their lives without them.

With those people out of the way, chimpanzees can be apes, not monkeys, and our children will know the difference.