[NooneAtAll3]

that's like saying tomato is a fruit

in biological journal, sure - for practical purposes straight up no

if it looks like a jellyfish, stings like a jellyfish and behaves like a jellyfish - then it doesn't matter what it looks like under a microscope, it is jellyfish

[the_af]

Portuguese Man o' Wars look distinct enough from jellyfish. Their sails make parts of their bodies float above water, something no jellyfish can do to my knowledge. I can confuse species of jellyfish but there's no confusing the man o' wars...

[bigDinosaur]

Many people now know that a tomato is a fruit, and will distinguish it with exactly the 'did you know a tomato is not a vegetable?' fun fact, so I'm not sure this is a great point. If someone asked me to list vegetables and they were being rigorous about it I wouldn't list a tomato. If they're not being rigorous about it then anything goes really - sometimes you can put things like apples in a salad so that must be a vegetable as well.

[moron4hire]

A tomato is definitely a vegetable.

Botanically, there are no such things as vegetables. The classification of a thing as a "vegetable" is strictly a culinary distinction. Cucumbers, tomatoes, apples, oranges, they're all the fruit of the plant, but the first two are culinarily classified as vegetables and the last two as fruits.

Also, salad is a preparation method, specifically the chopping of ingredients and the application of a sauce to make a semi homogeneous dish. It is not strictly a dish of chopped vegetables, so putting apples "in a salad" doesn't mean the apple is being used as a vegetable. You can put meat in a salad and it doesn't make the meat a vegetable. Tuna salad can be made with no vegetables at all.

[adrian_b]

In modern English, most people use "vegetable" with its current culinary meaning.

In earlier centuries, "vegetable" still had mostly its original meaning taken from Latin, where "Vegetabilia", as used e.g. by Linnaeus for the "vegetabile regnum", referred to any living beings capable of growth, but incapable of motion, i.e. mainly to the terrestrial plants.

Strictly speaking, seeds, grains, nuts, fruits, roots, bulbs, leaves, stems, etc. are all parts of vegetables.

What in English is now called "vegetables" corresponds to the Latin word "holera", whose original meaning was "greens", and not at all with the Latin word "vegetabilia". Also English "fruits" does not correspond with Latin "fructa", but with Latin "poma". Latin "fructa" referred to the useful results of some activity, a sense still encountered more rarely in English.

[moron4hire]

> a sense still encountered more rarely in English.

I don't know what you mean by that. People do talk about "the fruits of" their labors.

[adrian_b]

That it what I mean.

This old sense is encountered, like in your example, but much more often "fruits" is used in the culinary sense.

Many people perceive your example as a metaphor, the results of the labor being compared with the fruits of a tree, but in reality the direction of the metaphor has historically been opposite, the fruits of the tree being called thus because they were considered the useful results of its cultivation.

[eru]

Apples are not fruit in the strict botanical sense.

> Apples are considered "accessory fruits" (or sometimes termed "false fruits") rather than true botanical fruits because the fleshy, edible part develops primarily from the flower's hypanthium or receptacle, not just the ovary. The actual, true fruit is the core containing the seeds, making it a pome.

[keanebean86]

These discussions are really fun to me. The opportunities to be absurdly pedantic are almost endless. Common words for things gloss over so many details. Most of the time those details aren't important but they still exist and there's someone on the internet that cares deeply about them.

[ileonichwiesz]

My wife is a biologist, and as I understand biology on an academic level is just near-constant arguments about seemingly basic terms and concepts.

Life, species, gene, organism - we don’t actually have consistent definitions of what those are. Biology is the science of fluid spectrums, so any rigid classification you’d propose breaks down at the edges.

[adrian_b]

We must accept that most people are careless in their choice of words, so they frequently do not use the words in their strict sense but they use them in a broad sense, instead of using the most appropriate word.

However this is annoying, because especially with the modern fashion that linguistics shall be only descriptive and not prescriptive, like in the past, many words have become more and more ambiguous.

For this reason, misunderstandings have become more and more frequent, especially when using a medium like an Internet forum, which forces conciseness. Now, if you want to be certain that you will be understood correctly, more and more often you are forced to first define exactly many of the words that you intend to use, because the same words may be used by others with different meanings, even if in earlier literature everybody used only the meaning that you want.

[eru]

I wouldn't blame people. 'Fruit' is a perfectly fine English word.

I would blame botanists for overloading everyday terms with their own specialised meanings.

Mathematicians are also prone to this, but I guess it's less likely someone will mix up a ring or field in the everyday sense and in the mathematical sense.

[almosthere]

TIL tomatoes ARE vegetables and apples ARE NOT fruit!

[moron4hire]

My point still stands

[tolciho]

According to Nix v. Hedden, 149 U.S. 304 (1893) a tomato is a vegetable, so the riourous may need to account for that in the appropriate jurisdictions, especially if tarrifs are on the line, or at least to rember to have bigger lawyers than the competition. Also a carrot is a fruit (in EU, for purposes of jam classification), "I can't believe that superhero doll is not a doll", etc.