Ask HN: Teach me something new

Relatedly, in central and south America, _sapote_ is the native american term for (roughly) "edible fruit". The word has nothing to do with the taxonomy of these plants. European colonists made the mistake of adopting the word "sapote" for various different tree species ("what's this called?"; "sapote"), which has led to a lot of subsequent misunderstanding. If you google for "sapote" you'll find some results which naively attempt to give a latin classification to the unqualified "sapote". Now we have fairly useless english names for a variety of these regional fruits, such as (read "sapote" as "edible fruit" in these examples): "green sapote", "white sapote", "black sapote", "yellow sapote", "sun sapote", "south american sapote", and so on - although many of them also have more distinctive names (such as "canistel" or "chupa chupa"), which are much less ambiguous and should be preferred.

The company United Fruit was formed by the merger of two companies in 1899. One half of the merger was originally founded by an american railwayman, who obtained a 99 year lease of 800,000 acres of land from the Costa Rican government in exchange for constructing and operating a railway from the capital city to the carribean port of Limon (during the construction of which, thousands of laborers died from tropical disease). Once the railway started operating, usage was insufficient to pay back the debt on the loans that he'd taken out for construction, and so he pivoted to banana exports; the story goes that he had planted bananas along the tracks during construction as a cheap means of feeding his workers (which doesn't quite make sense given that bananas take 14+ months to fruit), and so he doubled down by increasing the density of planting over the area of the land that he owned, of course clearing more primary tropical forest to do so. The United Fruit company (today Chiquita) became heavily involved in politics in the countries that it was operating in, with the most famous example being its significant role in instigating the CIA backed coup in Guatamala in the 1950s that overturned the democratic government and installed a violent dictatorship, and led to 4 decades of civil war in which at least 140k people died, and which set Guatemalan economic development back by decades or more. So yeah, bananas.

Oh, and finally, there are dozens of varieties of bananas. The one that's exported most commonly (Cavendish) is relatively large and travels well, but is far from the most flavorful. There have been rumors of a killer fungus for many years, which hasn't had a significant impact on availability (yet); however, there are many varieties of bananas that aren't impacted by this fungus, so in the next decade or two we could see one of the other varieties replace Cavendish as the most widely consumed.

Originally from literal score in wood made as a tally mark when 20 items were counted.

Plus, dozens (and gross).

And base 60 becoming standard for time and degrees of a circle.

Minute (unit of time) comes from "minute (smaller part)", and second from second minute (small part of the small part).

Urgh.

Then again, does it matter? Probably not.