- elxeno ( @elxeno@lemm.ee ) 50•1 year ago
Is banana a berry or is it there just for scale?
- FiskFisk33 ( @FiskFisk33@startrek.website ) 42•1 year ago
yup https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_(botany)
a berry is a fleshy fruit without a stone (pit) produced from a single flower containing one ovary. Berries so defined include grapes, currants, and tomatoes, as well as cucumbers, eggplants (aubergines) and bananas, but exclude certain fruits that meet the culinary definition of berries, such as strawberries and raspberries.
- Comment105 ( @Comment105@lemm.ee ) 56•1 year ago
Botany should not have borrowed the word berry.
I am of the opinion that “a small, sweet, edible fruit” is closer to the right definition for the word, and that botanists’ decision to appropriate the word for a redefined purpose was inappropriate and unnecessary.
- phar ( @phar@lemmy.ml ) 3•1 year ago
When did this all occur? Was berry a word for things like strawberries before and then it was chosen by botanists to meet another definition?
- Ophy ( @ophy@lemmy.nz ) 14•1 year ago
Linguist here, if I may share my 2¢.
We do know that even over a thousand years ago, speakers of Old English were still calling these kinds of fruits berries, such as strawberries and blackberries (although pronunciation differed somewhat, of course). A word for strawberry as “earth berry” is even reconstructed for the proto Germanic language around 1500 to 2500 years ago. Beyond that, it becomes difficult to trace the word berry any further.
The Botanical sense of the word berry seems to come largely from at earliest the 1500s, from the writings of Caesalpinus, although the definitions were inconsistent and later writings on the matter constantly redefined things and added new terms. Although, largely, these writings all used Latinate terms for their botanical concepts, such as bacca (the closest to the modern botanical berry), and also words like pomum (pome/pomme), drupe, etc. for the other categories of fruit.
So, somewhere since all of that, some English-speaking botanist decided it would be a good idea to use the word berry to describe this concept of a bacca (even though berries had been used for distinctly different things from what that concept described), and now we end up in our current silly predicament where strawberries aren’t berries but pumpkins are.
I’d propose we call botanical berries “bayes” or “bayfruit”, the word bay/baye being an alternate word for berry that ultimately derived from the Latin word bacca, via Old French.
- cjsolx ( @cjsolx@beehaw.org ) 8•1 year ago
Sounds to me like we need a new definition for berry.
- somnuz ( @somnuz@lemm.ee ) 10•1 year ago
You mean Scaleberry?
Why are there no comments on this! It’s hilarious
- brennesel ( @brennesel@feddit.de ) 15•1 year ago
The taxonomy in biology can be really confusing. Potatoes (only their fruits), peppers, cucumbers, eggplants, avocados, lemons, oranges, kiwifruit and papayas are also in the berry club.
- PeriodicallyPedantic ( @PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ) 16•1 year ago
Potatoes are tubers, I don’t think they fit the botanical definition of a fruit. They contain no seeds, for example.
The rest are though. Pumpkins was the one that always blew my mind.
- jmcs ( @jmcs@discuss.tchncs.de ) 9•1 year ago
The potato plant poisonous fruit is a berry though.
- Blastasaurus ( @Blastasaurus@lemm.ee ) 5•1 year ago
The most forbidden Vodka…
- brennesel ( @brennesel@feddit.de ) 2•1 year ago
You are correct, but the potato plant bears potato fruits, which are classified as berries. I will clarify that in my comment.
- Mothra ( @Mothra@mander.xyz ) 4•1 year ago
I hope you mean the taxonomy in botany, things are much clearer on the zoological side
- brennesel ( @brennesel@feddit.de ) 1•1 year ago
Well, I’m not a biologist and even all my houseplants are constantly dying. For me, biology as a whole is confusing.
- moog ( @moog@lemm.ee ) 14•1 year ago
okay but whats with the bulge in the paper on panel 3…
- Shady_Shiroe ( @Shady_Shiroe@lemm.ee ) English19•1 year ago
I think that’s the top part of the paper bent backwards a bit casting a shadow
- FiskFisk33 ( @FiskFisk33@startrek.website ) 5•1 year ago
rageboner
- salient_one ( @salient_one@lemmy.villa-straylight.social ) English10•1 year ago
TIL banana is a berry! 🤯
- VikingHippie ( @VikingHippie@lemmy.wtf ) 6•1 year ago
I wonder if they’d consider Chuck eligible, though. He was undeniably a human but also a Berry.
- McInTyre007 ( @McInTyre007@lemmy.ml ) 4•1 year ago
Haha lol
- Chemical Wonka ( @chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de ) 3•1 year ago
What is a “berry” in fact?
- darthfabulous42069 ( @darthfabulous42069@lemm.ee ) 1•1 year ago
The definition of a berry doesn’t make sense then.