Is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus or just a really cool popotamus?

The nature of things, much like the nature of truth, is inherently both subjective and intrinsic for it is a concept and what we conceive is our individual interpretation and understanding. Things are not the way they are merely because we perceive them to be because of our inherent fallibility as human beings.This fallibility is what keeps us in the continual pursuit of perfection (through ethics,religion or philosophy) and will see us chasing the ideal for a very long time still. 

Things are what they are because that is what we see them as. There is nothing about a tree or a rock that makes it so; we as subjective human beings chose to give it such a name and forever bound the image and idea of both rock and tree to these respective words. With this then it becomes obvious why human beings have different ideas, values and beliefs for they all extend out of our subjective perspective, assessment and quantification/codification of the world around us; for is man's instinct and drive not to understand that which is unknown? 

Perhaps I am assessing this issue of reality and the nature of things too deeply, so I shall leave these questions aside for now and depart with this simple quote:

"Sleep is no easy feat: You have to stay awake all day to do it" - Friedrich Nietzsche