Simians

Jerry Friedman wrote: . ?My feeling is that the distinction has taken hold better than most

This may differ a lot between languages. Terry Pratchett has a character, to whom someone referred obliquely a little while ago, who is an ape and gets annoyed when people call him a monkey. This proved very hard to translate into French, because in French the same word 'singe' covers both. I'm with Jerry - to me they are different kinds of animal. to call an ape a monkey would be like calling a wolf a dog. (Of course, that might be appropriate in some contexts; but if I said there was a dog in the back garden, and it turned out to be a wolf, that would be deceptive.)

I suppose 'macaque' would be too far off to be usable.

Well, good luck: dogs have been reclasssified as a subspecies of wolf (i.e. not all wolves are dogs, but all dogs are wolves, so your garden is safe), which leaves us without a word for proper wolf. If only people realised genetics and taxonomy are independent.

Antonio Pedro Marques: I suppose 'macaque' would be too far off to be usable. Heh! Too specific actually. There is broad ranging monkey group called macaques which must be distinguished from other monkey groups like langurs and vervets and of course the New World monkeys which have prehensile tails. A US politician recently lost his election for publically calling a person of Indian ethnicity a "maccaca". Anyway, mention of macaques are good in my book, since the one called the barbary ape is Inuus sylvanus which has connections to both BotNS (Inire) and Long/Short Sun (Silver Silk).

Wolf wolf! (after /Rattus rattus/)

Or Mephitis mephitis?