Berry Club by J.L. Westlover (@mrlovenstein)
The thing is that the botanical definition of berries doesn’t match perfectly with the everyday definition. That doesn’t make the latter wrong, it just has other applications
Come up with an everyday definition for berry that includes strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries but excludes grapes, figs, and cherry tomatoes without identifying any particular fruit by name.
I could try to but I don’t need to. The fact that you could easily name some fruits that aren’t berries is proof enough that you have a concept of what a berry is and what isn’t. Coming up with a definition would be the next step.
So I agree that “definition” is the wrong word. I should have said “concept”. Besides: what’s wrong with definitions that are just a list of elements?
how about:
*berr*Are grapes not considered berries in the anglosphere? In Icelandic they literally are named “Wine berries” and considered as such.
More evidence than the concept of “an every day definition of berry” is completely meaningless
I mean, it isn’t meaningless, just culturally subjective and lacking a rigerous definition. Berries are a set of specific fruit, which fruit being included being determined by the culture in question base on percieved similarities and historic uses. We use it to quickly bring up the specific group and whatever vague characteristics we percieve them to share.
So, the definition for berries that you seek is simply “the fruit people you’re interested in would point at and identify as a berry”, which is a vague definition and not rigerous at all, but most people would in fact think of the same thing you do if you say “I put berries on top of my cake”. If I ask my wife “hey, on your way home swing by the store and buy some berries, any type will do”, she will not bring a watermelon. She in fact will buy what we both agree are berries, and so the word has useful meaning.
You’ll find most classifications humans have do this too. The real world is really good at refusing to fit into the neat boxes we made to classify it and the things in it, and yet we can still use them fine enough as long as we don’t get lost in semantics and wondering if a hot dog is a sandwich or cereal soup.
Fun fact: strawberry was admitted to the psychiatric yard once pepper and cucumber joined the berry club.
Fun fact: the psychiatric yard is where the psych ward doctors are allowed to go outside and play for an hour everyday, and where a psychologist is most likely to be shanked by a psychiatrist.
Fun fact: Strawberry is called an accessory fruit because its seeds are on the outside, so the seeds themselves are the real “fruits” (in the same way each grain of rice or wheat is itself a fruit, well technically the fruit consists of the grain plus the outer pod/husk that gets removed when harvested). The red flesh we like to eat is the accessory fruit because it in itself does not contain seeds.
Raspberries and blackberries are called aggregate fruits because they’re essentially many fruits attached together as a single structure. Actually, a strawberry is called an aggregate accessory fruit because it has many “fruits” directly attached to an accessory structure.
If every Uni professor started each lecture with "fun fact: " I bet I’d learn alot more
