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So what? The point is that in my second sentence I addressed your objection to the first sentence. My point is that the current definition of “fish” excludes all manners of creatures traditionally called “fish.”

This either means that the current definition is wrong, or that the people who traditionally called these creatures “fish” misunderstood the nature of what they were calling fish. The simple-minded refutation by two generations of idiot first-grade teachers is that “most people didn’t realize that they were really mammals.” That’s just plain stupid.

The ancient Greeks called dolphins (a subset of whales) “Ixthos delphis,” meaning, roughly, “womb fish.” (I probably botched the Greek cases.) See, the Greeks knew that dolphins had wombs, and called them “Ixthos” anyway.

So what makes a fish a fish?

The idiots of today say they are “finned, cold-blooded, oviparous, scale-covered, jawed vertebrates.” What they really mean is simply that they are members of a clade of supposedly evolutionarily related organisms lumped together as Class Pisces.

But that’s a problem since there is no working definition of Pisces.

Not all Pisces are cold-blooded.
Not all Pisces are oviparous (egg-laying).
All Pisces are vertebrates, but that only engenders the same confusion over Subphyllum Vertebrata.
Not all Pisces have jaws.
Not all Pisces have fins.
Several fish lack more than one of these qualities.
And, of course, the biggest problem is that Pisces is “parapheletic”; the scientists who supposed that they were all related to each other more closely than to members of other groups were simply wrong. According to biological cladistics, you have far more in common with a trout than that trout has in common with a shark.