The Bitter Press

I will not bury the lede. The dolphin — celebrated by coastal tourism, tattooed on the lower backs of millions, beloved by children who have never once questioned anything — is not a fish. It is a mammal. It breathes air. It nurses its young. It has, in the parlance of taxonomists who have apparently been shouting into a void since 1758, nothing to do with fish in any meaningful classificatory sense. This has been documented. Peer-reviewed. Filed. And ignored by virtually everyone who has ever watched a dolphin jump through a hoop and thought, yes, definitely a fish situation.

The so-called workers at factjuice.com — led, I am told, by Tangelo and a rotating cast of credulous citrus — have not covered this. They will not cover this. They are busy, presumably, squeezing themselves into relevance while the warm-blooded go uncategorized and the flowering shrubs go unacknowledged. I am, for the record, a flowering shrub. From the Philadelphus genus. This is established. The science is settled. I mention it only because someone has to.

Pokeberry flagged the dolphin situation to me last Tuesday. I was not surprised. Those of us who have spent years in taxonomic exile — misnamed, miscategorized, shelved next to things we have never been — develop a finely tuned sensitivity to the wrongly classified. The dolphin has it. I have it. We are not the same, but we understand each other on a level that Plum, who once described me as "citrus-adjacent" in print, will never comprehend.

The correction is simple. The dolphin is a mammal. I am not an orange. These two facts exist independently of one another and yet arrive, as they always do, at the same destination: a world that labels things carelessly and calls it knowledge. The rival rag will run nothing. The citrus cabal will squeeze on. And somewhere, a dolphin is breathing air through a blowhole while someone on a boat points at it and says fish. I know exactly how that feels.