• xantoxis@lemmy.world
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    7 hours ago

    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.

    • JayObey711@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      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.

    • BossDj@lemm.ee
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      4 hours ago

      They did. It’s Baca. Which means berry. Or maybe cow. Naming stuff is hard

    • Chadus_Maximus@lemm.ee
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      4 hours ago

      Seeing the creator write “actually,” instead of “oh yeah?” somehow feels wrong.

      • chuckleslord@lemmy.world
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        8 hours ago

        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?

          • chuckleslord@lemmy.world
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            8 hours ago

            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.

            • essteeyou@lemmy.world
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              4 hours ago

              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.

              • chuckleslord@lemmy.world
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                4 hours ago

                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.

                • essteeyou@lemmy.world
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                  4 hours ago

                  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”

            • exasperation@lemm.ee
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              8 hours ago

              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.

  • lugal
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    13 hours ago

    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

      • lugal
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        8 hours ago

        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.

        • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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          6 hours ago

          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.