use of "animal" as a synonym for mammal

While watching episodes of the old game show "What's My Line," circa 1957-1962, the very literate panelists regularly use the word "animal" to mean "mammal," as in "Do you work with fish as opposed to animals?" (Similarly, "Do you work with chickens as opposed to animals?")

I've never heard this usage anywhere else and cannot find information on it.

Any thoughts?

Solution 1:

Animal, Vegetable, and Mineral

When children begin a round of Twenty Questions by asking if the object to be guessed is animal, vegetable, or mineral, they are echoing a taxonomy that since the time of Aristotle divided physical things into these three great “kingdoms”:

…it must also follow that both the Starrs in the higher heaven and the compound-creatures, beneath in the elementary world; be they meteorologicall, or of a more perfect mixtion, namely animal vegetable or minerall, must in respect of their materiall part or existence proceed from waters, … — Robert Fludd, trans., Mosaicall philosophy grounded upon the essentiall truth, or eternal sapience, 1659. EEBO

In common language, Aristotle’s three kingdoms became a metonym for the entire physical world, as in this 18th c. brewing manual written “by a person formerly concerned in a public brewhouse in London”:

For this Purpose, in my Opinion, the Air and Soil are to be regarded where the Brewing is performed, since the Air affects all Things it can come at, whether Animal, Vegetable or Mineral … — The London and Country Brewer, 5th ed., London, 1744.

This means that on one level — thanks to Aristotle and people like the London brewery expert who continued to use the phrase — every child who’s ever played Twenty Questions somehow figures out that a chicken, whale, or earthworm is an animal.

Biblical Beast and Aristotelian Animal

With the same meaning as in Twenty Questions, i.e., ‘sentient living creature’, animal entered English from Latin animale, ‘being that breathes’, in the early 14c. The Germanic deor (cf. Ger. Tier) was well on its way out except for the hart, now known generically as a deer. Although still rare before 1600, the word animal eventually supplanted the French borrowing beast in most contexts. This eventual substitution will prove significant for the narrowing in popular language of the non-plant, non-mineral animal.

A query at Open Source Shakespeare, for instance, yields only 8 results for animal, most notably in “paragon of animals” in Hamlet’s soliloquy “What a piece of work is man.” Beast, however, including the adverb beastly, shows up 118 times.

The King James translation of the Bible (KJV, 1611) doesn’t use the word animal a single time, only beast. For its impact on the language, whether the same Hebrew or Koine Greek word lies behind this usage is, of course, irrelevant. Beast was what was read, heard, and considered divinely inspired — not as a backdoor taxonomy, but as language that influenced English even as the KJV’s beasts were being replaced by animals in everyday speech.

A psalm verse is the only place where sea creatures are generically beasts:

So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts. Ps 104.25

Otherwise, beast can occur in lists understood metonymically as ‘all sentient life’, often contrasted to birds/fowl:

But ask now the beasts, and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee: Job 12.7

Occasionally a more complete list is crafted for rhetorical effect:

And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so. Gen 1.30.

So that the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the heaven, and the beasts of the field, and all creeping things that creep upon the earth, and all the men that are upon the face of the earth, shall shake at my presence, and the mountains shall be thrown down, and the steep places shall fall, and every wall shall fall to the ground. Ez 38.

Fish, fowl, beasts, creeping things, and humans is, I think, the most detailed list in Scripture. This taxonomy echoes in John Locke:

And the terrestrial animals may be divided into quadrupeds or beasts, reptiles, which have many feet, and serpents, which have no feet at all. Insects, which in their several changes belong to several of the beforementioned divisions, may be considered together as one great tribe of animals. — John Locke, Elements of Natural Philosophy, 1689.

While Samuel Johnson’s 1775 dictionary firmly agrees that snakes are not reptiles, criticizing those writers who “confound” the two and even abridging the passage in Locke for support, a scorpion is a “reptile much resembling a small lobster.” This makes perfect etymological sense: a reptile (late 14th c.), ultimately from the Latin verb repere, ‘to crawl, creep’, is quite literally a creeping thing, and a snake isn’t a creepy-crawly.

Now this merry romp through three centuries of taxonomy in English shows that there were various means of classifying sentient creatures, both popular and scientific. It’s when the Aristotelian animal begins to take over for the biblical beast that things get even more “confounded.” The word mammal, however, doesn’t even come into play until the 19 th c.

Mammal

The same Aristotelian taxonomy of animal, vegetable, and mineral underlies Carl Linnaeus’ 1735 classification: with Regnum Animale and Regnum Vegetabile he initially included Aristotle’s third kingdom, the Regnum Lapideum. For the class of animals that nurse their young, Linneaus coined the term Mammalia, but the English word mammal doesn’t appear until 1826. That’s hardly a surprise: the scientific names of new species of animals and plants are still today coined in Latin, and early zoologists and paleontologists saw no need for an English word until it moved into the general culture:

The sense of touch, besides being distributed over the whole surface of the body, possesses, in the mammal class of animals, and in some birds and insects, its peculiar local organ, as well as the other senses. — William Gordon, “Essay on the Analogy between the Structure and Functions of Vegetables and Animals,” lecture, Hull Literary and Philosophical Society, Nov. 19. 1830. Printed: Magazine of natural history and journal of zoology, botany, mineralogy, geology and meteorology 5 (1832).

Birds, fishes, reptiles, even insects (1601, Latin, bodies in sections) were well established English words; only a countable noun for the Mammalia class was missing. Gordon’s use, however, isn’t a countable noun, but an adjective tied more firmly to the Latin.

Mammal in the Press

The word began to appear in British and Irish newspapers in the mid- to late 1830’s, mostly reporting on the discovery of fossil deposits, public lectures such as Gordon’s, or reviewing scientific books, some for more popular consumption:

The molars (back teeth grinders) are those which most generally exist, the narwhale being the only mammal, with the exceptions already enumerated, in which they do not exist. — Cheltenham Chronicle (Gloucestershire), 21 Jan. 1836. BNA [paywall]

The valley contains numerous skeletons of mammals and birds. In one case the skeleton of a human being was seen with the head resting upon the right hand. — Nottingham Journal, 21 Apr. 1837. BNA [paywall]

Of these, twenty-two pages related to the mammals ; sixteen to birds ; nine to reptiles and fishes; two to shells and minerals; nine to insects; … — Bolton Chronicle (Lancashire), 11 Aug. 1838. BNA [paywall]

The whale, which is strictly a mammal, and not a fish, breathes by means of lungs, and, therefore, requires to rise to the surface of the water repeatedly. — Freeman's Journal (Dublin), 28 May 1839. BNA [paywall]

Mammal reaches the popular press in North America and Australia in the next decade. The first American usage, however, is quite an outlier:

On the retirement of the ladies, this extraordinary mammal called for brandy and cigars; which being forthwith provided, he preceeded to imbibe and exhale, talking from between his teeth in a high nasal tone, expectorating, at short intervals, betwixt the bars of the grate, with the precision of a Chickasaw rifleman. — Alexandria Gazette_, 2 Feb. 1842.

This curious passage lambasts an American in London, whom the author views as pretentious, affected, and holding absurd political views, such as freeing the slaves. The article, replete with its n-word racial slur, also appeared in several newspapers in England in late January of that year, first in the Hull Packet (BNA, paywall) on 21 Jan. The closeness of dates suggested either a prior source or that the author sent the article to various newspapers for publication.

The main point here, however, is that the author aims his attempts at humor at a particular class of reader who knew the word, along with biped which appears earlier in the article, or would feel like they should know it and might go find out.

All other early attestations parallel those from Britain:

…and there was not any conclusive evidence of a genus of placental mammal in that collection [of fossils]. — Sydney Morning Herald, 7 Aug. 1843.

The dog and the elephant prefigured the sagacity of the human mind. The love of a human mother for her babe was anticipated by nearly every humbler mammal, the carnaria not excepted. — The North-Carolinian, (Fayetteville NC), 24 May 1845.

For instance, the department of Vertebrates, which includes all animals having an internal skeleton with a back-bone for its axis, is divided into four classes, — Mammals, or animals which nurse their young, Birds, Reptiles and Fishes. — Cambridge Chronicle (MA), 6 Jul. 1848.

Present Day English

In 1888, the first volume of the New English Dictionary, later known as the Oxford Dictionary, notes that the word animal is “[o]ften restricted by the uneducated to quadrupeds.” While “uneducated” may be both harsh and optimistic — assuming that Linnean taxonomy had fully penetrated the educated classes and controlled their daily speech — it means that anyone using animal as the KJV and John Locke did the now antiquated beast is using the word improperly. The problem here is that this earlier usage echoes up until our own day, including among those who consider their “beastly” understanding of animal authoritative. It is a lexical clash between the Aristotelian animal and the beast of old:

Birds, unlike animals, have no teeth with which to masticate their hard food, such as corn … — The Voice of the North (Newcastle NSW), 11 April 1919.

Birds, unlike animals, are very soon as large as their parents, so that it is hard to tell which is which. — The Brisbane Courier — 19 April 1930.

Unlike animals and very few fish, the shellback may harmlessly lose a claw or a leg—he has the ability to rapidly grow a new member. — Santa Cruz Sentinel (CA), 3 Nov. 1939.

This idea probably arises from the fact that reptiles, unlike animals, whose vitality is centred in the brain, have their vitality distributed along the spine and in other organs as well.— The Land (Richmond NSW), 14 July 1950.

Reportedly, one of the second grade teachers was teaching that a whale is a mammal, not an animal.— Anson R. Nash, Jr., He Who Laughs, Lasts, 2004, 230.

If one acknowledges that animals in these newspaper articles occupies the same lexical space as KJV-Locke beasts, they make perfect sense. This hidden etymology also haunts disagreements on the internet:

Got a Zootropolis book adaptation yesterday…, but I did find some problems with it. Most are just nitpicks (such as the text using the word animal instead of mammal. Zootopia is PG, I think most older children know about different types of animal.) — Forum, Nation States, 31 Mar. 2016.

A rare fin whale, second in size only to the blue whale, one of the largest animals in the world has been washed up on the beach near Kimmeridge. — Swanage View [Dorset], 7 Nov. 2012.
Anonymous said...
It is, more accurately, a mammal, not ‘an animal’.
The Postman said...
Far be it from me to be picky... but I think it’s an animal... that happens to be a mammal rather than a fish....

Watney also mentioned he did some whale watching prior to–and possibly during–the round. "(whale watching) was awesome. They are humoungous (sic) animals." And while some of you may say to yourself, a whale is a mammal, not an animal, a quick biology lesson reveals that a whale is an animal (vertabrate) first, then a mammal. Whatever the case, Watney continues to go for different kinds of animals (birdies, eagles) in rounds 2, 3 and 4.

I am an only child (to my Mum anyway), i have 2 dogs that mean the world to me as i love animals, my favourite animal however is probably a dolphin, ok, yeah it’s a mammal not an animal, but still, same thing, right? — About us – The Roaming Emperors blog

Except possibly for the KJV Psalm 104, whales and dolphins are not beasts, the only sense in which they can be mammals but not animals.

Conclusion

When animal took over the more restricted lexical space of beast, it led and leads to a “confounded” use of animal for some speakers. With their elite, non-rhotic New York speech that once was the prestige accent in large parts of America, the panel of “What’s My Line,” co-founder of Random House Bennet Cerf, columnist Dorothy Kilgallen, and actress Arlene Francis, hardly qualify as the “uneducated” of the NED. They are simply using a popular taxonomy with its own rich history.

The corrective to this nonstandard “beastly” usage by the quiz show panelists, of course, would have been the standard opener for Twenty Questions: animal, vegetable, or mineral.