Sometimes you feel like a peanut is not a nut!
Sometimes you don't!
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2024
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This feels like a case where botanical science should just have picked a different name. If you invalidate everything people think of as a berry and then tell them a dozen things that are clearly not berries are, in fact, berries, you're just making the word berry meaningless.
Berry means a tiny, usually sweet, fruit-like growth from a plant. The kind that is usually picked in bunches. The kind that you use to make smoothies. That's a berry.
Botany did us all a disservice by choosing the word "berry" to mean "a specific thing which invalidates everything you think is a berry." Just call that plant structure something in Latin, ffs.
Well, cooking terms and botany terms are not the same. Any non reproductive part of a plant is vegetable. But in cooking we have a completely different idea of what vegetables are.
This really doesn't matter because most people are not botanists and those who are probably know the terms. The only people that care are quirky internet people with debates about weather or not potato salad should be considered a cake or something.
They did. It's Baca. Which means berry. Or maybe cow. Naming stuff is hard
Seeing the creator write "actually," instead of "oh yeah?" somehow feels wrong.
I appreciate the skittles reference
Is it a skittles reference or is it a reference to purple not being an actual color and thus not a part of the rainbow?
I believe it’s indigo not purple there.
the heck do you mean purple is not an actual colour??
Purple, the color directly between red and blue, is a creation of your mind interpreting a band of light that triggers your red and blue sensing nerves, but no green is sensed. The actual band of light we can see goes from red to green to blue. Purple doesn't fall between those colors, meaning it wouldn't be included in a rainbow, and isn't any "pure" light you could see, since it doesn't fall on the spectrum.
Essentially, any time you see purple, you're seeing two different frequencies of light that your mind interprets as a single frequency.
Your definition of color is based only on human perception? Is purple a color for a mantis shrimp?
Edit: I guess not in a pure sense because it's still two wavelengths of light. Perhaps a mantis shrimp can detect a totally different wavelength and sees it as "purple" or something.
Now I'm thinking about how we don't know how other humans interpret colors. Like what I see as red, you may see as blue. Ugh.
Definition I'm using is any color that can be expressed as a single wavelength of light. Purple cannot be, since it's actually two wavelengths simultaneously.
Perceiving it as a color seems more practical though. It's not like we look at "red" and think "ah yes, a single wavelength of light"
What is violet at the end of the visible spectrum, then? We call the higher wavelength stuff ultraviolet, and violet looks purple to me, so I'm having trouble reconciling this stuff with what you're saying.
We call it that but our eyes see the far end frequency as a colour that only very slightly activates blue sensitive cone receptors and no others. For red sensitive cones there is a slight bump in the high end frequencies also that makes it possible for them to look violet as it activates the blue sensitive and a bit of red sensitive receptors but a much purpler purple is made by combining high and low frequencies.
There is evidence to show that violet does actually weakly activates red cones too. This is because the violet light starts creeping up to double the frequency of the lower end of the red sensitivity, and so it can actually successfully activate it very weakly. There are other factors that can lessen or even fully negate that effect though, it's all kind of fuzzy.
That's because the scientific definition of berries has little in common with the colloquial one. That doesn't make either wrong, they are just used in different contexts
We really should rename botanical berries to something else.
The thing is, there is for sure some Latin technical term that you can use. And it's still close enough to berries to call them that.
Oh probably, but I don't speak latin. Most people don't speak latin; there's like 1000 people in the world maximum who could hold a conversation in latin.
Botanical vs culinary.
Scary-berry
but what about boo-berry?
Ah! A person of rare and refined taste!
A berry is a watery, often sweet fruit under 4cm
That is the colloquial definition. The scientific definition of a berry differs a bit.
Pumpkin pie also rarely is made with pumpkin, it's usually squash
Pumpkin pie is gross. Apple is the superior turkey-day pie.
Pumpkin pie is always made with squash. Occasionally, those squash are pumpkins
Pumpkin is a squash
Having made pumpkin pies for decades, this is true. Pumpkin is a squash.
What?
Botanically speaking they are correct.
How is a pumpkin a berry?
With great effort, I imagine. A pumpkin is also a squash.
Pumpkins are cool
What about what?
The post probably.
What post?
What?
Sir, this is a Wendy’s
No it's a berry.
Sir, this is a berry.
No, This is PATRICK