Also offensive: pointing out that English speakers do not use the word “American” to refer to people from Latin America. The term in our language is universally used to refer to people from the country America.

  • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.works
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    8 hours ago

    a tomato is both, a fruit and a vegetable, btw… those terms are not mutually exclusive, because things like fruit, root and leaves refer to the part of the plant, while vegetable refers to how it can be used.

    • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
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      18 minutes ago

      You’re in the right direction. The only missing piece is the word “fruit” referring to two, partially overlapping, concepts:

      • botanical - “fruit” as a part of the plant as opposed to stem, leaf, flower etc.
      • culinary - “fruit” as an ingredient as opposed to vegetable, meat, seasoning etc.

      Tomato is a botanical fruit, but not a culinary fruit. And this means that all those “mmh, ackshyually tomato is not a vegetable” claims you see in those discussions are simply a four terms fallacy.

      And, more importantly, when people talk about fruits, you typically know which of those two concepts they’re talking about, due to the context (are we talking about plant development? or cooking?). And the same applies to “America” referring to the country bordering Canada versus the continent that country controls some territory of. (If you see the whole thing as a single continent, that is. That’s roughly as useful as to talk about Afro-Eurasia as a single continent.). And all those “ackshyually” tend to diverge the discussion from shit that matters into things that don’t matter.