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Nornagest comments on Talking Snakes: A Cautionary Tale - Less Wrong
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Nitpick: humans are a subgroup of apes, apes are a subgroup of EDIT simians, and simians are a subgroup of primates; “monkey” refers to non-ape simians specifically and “ape” is often colloquially used to refer to non-human apes specifically, whereas I can't remember anyone using “primate” to exclude humans (and BTW, I can't recall “mammal” nor “vertebrate” ever being used to exclude humans either whereas “animal” often is; colloquial English¹ is weird).
That's not how I learned it, nor how Wikipedia describes it. I understand "monkey" as a term describing a polyphyletic grouping consisting of the Old World monkeys (a family-level group, the Cercopithecidae) and the New World monkeys (five families), but not including the apes. Originally I expect the presence of a tail would have been the distinguishing factor.
"Simian" is the word for both, while "primate" also includes lemurs, tarsiers, and so forth. (Colloquially, "ape" is often taken to exclude humans, but that's understood to be technically wrong by anyone that accepts evolution.)
Whatever.
If you reply "well, humans aren't really descended from monkeys, they're descended from _", you're just being pedantic. To an average person, being descended from "apes" or "non-human apes" or "non-human monkeys", or "monkey-like creatures not exactly like any existing monkey", or any other "correction" will have pretty much the same connotations as and be objectionable in exactly the same way as and to exactly the same extent as, being descended from monkeys.
It's like someone complaining that all the computers in his house were stolen, and replying "well, in fact, your microwave oven contains a computer, so it's not really true that all the computers in your house were stolen".
Sure. Outside of a biology class I wouldn't nitpick someone saying "humans are descended from monkeys"; it might be wrong by the formal definitions of those groups, but it's not wrong in any way that the Muslim woman in the ancestor will care about, and if the last common ancestor of H. sapiens and, say, a spider monkey were alive today it'd probably be called a monkey in English.
(Not my downvote, by the way.)
OK. I was under the impression that in serious contexts everyone used monophyletic definitions of nearly everything by now, but it looks like “monkey” has retained the traditional meaning because there already is an unambiguous non-unwieldy word “simian” for the monophyletic meaning. I'm editing the grandparent accordingly. So, humans are descended from monkeys but are not themselves monkeys (and they are descended from fish but are not themselves fish, for that matter), but “both monkeys and humans belong to a larger category of creatures called apes” is still wrong (and even if you s/apes/simians/ it's still irrelevant unless you also say that said category is monophyletic or otherwise carves reality at some relevant joint, both chickens and humans belong to a larger category of creatures called bipeds, yadda yadda yadda).