I think it’s that people like certain levels of specificness. Like, bread, pizza, and broccoli are all foods, but if you said “I had a food for lunch” that’d sound weird.

It’s not necessarily that cake isn’t a type of bread or that the two aren’t closely related. It’s that we have a super-common and more specific word for it (cake) so it sounds awkward when you use a different word that might be technically accurate, but is a weird choice in practice.

Same for a lot of things. A hot dog and a sub are technically the same thing. But if a waiter dropped off your hot dog and said “here’s your pork sub”, you’d probably look at them funny.

Ehhhh careful. That line of thinking could easily turn into “I am the age that I say I am and I don’t care that you think Gary is a creepy pedo. My body is 8 years old but I feel like a 40 year old and Gary understands that!”

To your point. Age shouldn’t matter beyond that one transition from “legal guardian protects you while your brain finishes development” and “you are now legally an adult and in control (and responsible for) your own actions”.

I think this is why the US legal system actually gets this one pretty close to right.

I agree in theory. But then I see people breaking the rules when it doesn’t “make sense” (as far as they could see) and then nearly fucking things up. My rule is “if I break this rule and it turns out that I didn’t actually have all the important info such that I really should have followed the rule… Well, that’ll be on me. So how confident am I that I really do have all the relevant info?”