Orak Listalavostok wrote:
> Of course, you'd instantly loudly proclaim:
>  "My own experiences with pepper confirm that I do taste pepper!"
>  "So there!".
>
> Yet, I'd immediately retort with:
>  Sure, we "seem" to "taste" pepper; but our tongue, lips, cheeks, the
>  underside of our tongue, the roof of our mouth, and the back of our
>  throat have only four basic types of taste buds: bitter, sour,
> salty, and sweet.
>
>  Certainly there's a "feeling" when you eat hot peppers. But it isn't
>  taste.

There's a linguistic issue here: what does the word "taste" mean?  For
scientists, it means "what you can sense with the taste buds on your
tongue."  For everyone else, it's the whole assortment of sensations we get
when we put something in our mouth, regardless of whether those sensations
come from our taste buds or somewhere up in our nose, or somewhere else.
(With certain exceptions: if you poke your tongue with a needle, you don't
consider that a taste, no matter how many taste buds the needle may
encounter.)

It's sort of like telling Herman Melville that a whale isn't a fish.  He was
quite aware of the differences between gill-breathing fish and mammalian
whales, he just had a different definition of "fish" than a zoologist would
have.

Of course, I'm not sure what this has to do with rec.running, or the other
ngs this thread is going to...

    Mike McSwell