According to this news just in,* strawberries are not berries. I can’t accept that. I can live with Pluto not being a planet, but this is a step too far. According to the same article, watermelons, pumpkins, avocados and bananas are berries.
That’s just a whole bunch of bullshit. Sure, there might be some technical definition depending on how they grow and where there seeds are placed or something, and that might be important to whatever you call scientists who classify plants, and that’s one definition. Then there is the common English language definition which is, regardless of what the dictionary says, any small, delicious fruit that you can eat a lot of at one time and whose name ends in -berry.
Examples are blueberries, blackberries, mulberries, boysenberries, gooseberries, pillberries (which were featured in Dr. Seuss’ short story “Gertrude McFuzz,” a cautionary tale about using cosmetic enhancement to build self-esteem), raspberries and, of course, the biggest and reddest of them all, the aristocrat of the berry world, the one most closely associated with thick cream and picnic tables and late spring afternoons or with champagne in fancy glasses in expensive hotel rooms at after opening night parties – strawberries.
Avocados and cream sounds rather revolting and most people would probably accompany a good guacamole with sangria, or maybe beer.
Watermelons and pumpkins? Seriously? Berries with a hard, inedible skin? That’s the most unberry like thing in the world. That’s like a fish that can’t swim or a bird that can’t fly. Well, O.K., there are a few animals in that last category, but they are always referred to with a qualifier, “flightless birds.”
And bananas?” I’ve spent years impressing people with the factoid (Well, perhaps nobody was ever really impressed) that bananas aren’t actually fruit, they are a member of the grass family. Now, they tell me they are berries?!
It’s just impossible to keep up.
*actually, I don’t know if this is new at all or just one of those articles the Huffington Post runs now and then because another possible shutdown of the government, the debate over Health Care, the mass shooting in Kenya, and the civil war inside the Republican Party are just not news enough. But it’s news to me, so here you are.
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