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I read up on these things some time ago, and what amused me the most is that while almost every vegetable is a fruit, the Juniper berry is, in fact, a cone.
> almost every vegetable is a fruit. I think you'll need to clarify that a bit - most vegetables are roots, leaves, flowers or stalks.
After the Tariff Act of 1883 taxed vegetables (but not fruits), produce seller John Nix — no relation to the package manager — sued to get tomatoes classified as a fruit.
The court held that the “common meaning” mattered more than the botanical one:
“Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas. But in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions, all these are vegetables which are grown in kitchen gardens, and which, whether eaten cooked or raw, are, like potatoes, carrots, parsnips, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery, and lettuce, usually served at dinner in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meats which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits generally, as dessert.“
If you’re in New York, you can celebrate Nix’s memory by eating at a fancy vegetarian restaurant[2], or, of course, you can just use the package manager or operating system.
[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/149/304/ , or see the wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden [2] http://www.nixny.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just wordplay, a basic pun, because the same word, "berry", appears in two different contexts. In everyday usage, a strawberry is a berry, but in botany it's not. If you're doing botany, you should probably use the latin term Fragaria instead of strawberry. Edit: If you like this, you'll also find interesting that many nuts (hazlenuts, walnuts, Brazil nuts, pecans, almonds) are not nuts but seeds. One of the few…
Hazelnuts are also botanical nuts.
And Tomatoes, by ruling of a Massachusetts court, “are a vegetable for tax purposes”
And Congress ruled that tomato pizza sauce is a vegetable for nutritional purposes. Don't you feel well legislated ? https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/did-congr...
I find the article pleasant in its writting and humour. For me this goes to show that thin clickbait articles can be interesting, it's just that most people who can write don't usually do clickbait. Excerpt: > The technical definition of a berry is "a fleshy fruit produced from a single ovary." If you're not too familiar with botany, this definition probably isn't helpful at all. But once you learn that oranges and t…
And of course the technical definition supersedes the use of the word "berry" in the English language...
> you may start to question reality
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Cooks know the taste of the tomato and will use it accordingly. this is an exceptionally simplistic view since tomato is readily available as juice, as opposed as zucchini and peppers, whose are seldom used in cocktails that aren't smoothies
Peppers are also fruits though. I think this is merely a flaw with the English language. Tomatoes are fruits (fruit of the tomato plant) but they are not fruit (a food category). It's two separate words with different grammatical treatment.
Is anything actually gained from rigid definitions like this? People clearly use berry in a different way than botanists do.
It's just wordplay, a basic pun, because the same word, "berry", appears in two different contexts. In everyday usage, a strawberry is a berry, but in botany it's not. If you're doing botany, you should probably use the latin term Fragaria instead of strawberry. Edit: If you like this, you'll also find interesting that many nuts (hazlenuts, walnuts, Brazil nuts, pecans, almonds) are not nuts but seeds. One of the few…
I find the article pleasant in its writting and humour. For me this goes to show that thin clickbait articles can be interesting, it's just that most people who can write don't usually do clickbait. Excerpt: > The technical definition of a berry is "a fleshy fruit produced from a single ovary." If you're not too familiar with botany, this definition probably isn't helpful at all. But once you learn that oranges and t…
And of course the technical definition supersedes the use of the word "berry" in the English language...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is one thing to gain: an easy lesson in how things can be subjective. I believe the world suffers because many people profoundly reject this.
People who write code for robot compilers (aka programmers) often make this mistake. People who write code for human compilers (aka writers) embrace the subjectivity/variability of those human compilers