German is a romance language now? 
The power of compound words compels you, Menschenaffe!
Apes absolutely are a specific sub-group of monkeys . Just like humans are a subgroup of apes.
There's no way around it. Deal with it 
Look, fool; in English, that's not how you use those words. The 'way around it' would be to use the scientific classification, but nobody in their right mind uses Hominoidae (greater and lesser apes, humans), Cercopithecidae (old world monkeys) and Platyrrhini (new world monkeys) in normal conversation. Or superimposes the English words for the genera or species onto the families or superfamilies, for that matter. 
Look breh. Both old and new world monkeys are, well, monkeys. Their common ancestor (and we know of several) was a monkey. Therefore everything past that point (including gorillas, chimps and yes, humans) are monkeys.
My point is that stupid language distinction is what leads people to go like "no no no we're different". Which basically makes "monkeys" a paraphyletic group, which makes no goddamn sense. Apes never stopped being monkeys. Just like humans never stopped being apes.
Monkey and Ape are words that have romance (e.g: mona in spanish) and germanic (e.g affe in german) roots and, just like another couple hundreds words in the english language, actual mean exactly the same thing.
If you take my example above, in these languages those terms would be used interchangeably to translate "monkey" or "ape". A distinction was made at some point in english, for whatever reason. Well, the english language is a goddamn fucking mess.
