Is banana a berry or is it there just for scale?
this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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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.
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.
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?
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.
You mean Scaleberry?
That's ok accessory fruit club is pretty cool. I always preferred drupe club though.
drupe group
First rule of accessory fruit club is, you do not talk about accessory fruit club. Second rule of accessory fruit club is, you DO NOT TALK ABOUT ACCESSORY FRUIT CLUB.
Why are there no comments on this! It's hilarious
They hated tomato for he spoke the truth
I see two comments :P
okay but whats with the bulge in the paper on panel 3....
I think that's the top part of the paper bent backwards a bit casting a shadow
Its "accessory."
rageboner
This is nuts!
Unlike peanuts which are legumes
I heard the seeds on the outside of the strawberry are berries.
That's nuts!
But not peanuts, they're actually legumes :(
I'm eating a legume right now! Cool!
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.
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.
You are correct, but the potato plant bears potato fruits, which are classified as berries. I will clarify that in my comment.
I hope you mean the taxonomy in botany, things are much clearer on the zoological side
Here's the thing...
Well, I'm not a biologist and even all my houseplants are constantly dying. For me, biology as a whole is confusing.
I wonder if they'd consider Chuck eligible, though. He was undeniably a human but also a Berry.
Old comic but still one of my all time favorites
TIL banana is a berry! 🤯
Wow... my life was a lie
What is a "berry" in fact?
Haha lol
would bananas being seedless mean that they are also not berries?
Bananas have seeds. We've just bred them for hundreds of generations so the seeds are small and so soft you don't even notice them.
Bananas have seeds, they're just incredibly degenerated in commercial bananas. Next time you have one, break off a chunk and count the black specks inside. Each one would've been a seed if not for generations of human intervention.
Here's a website with a picture of a banana with seeds
The definition of a berry doesn't make sense then.
There are multiple definitions for berry