• no banana@lemmy.worldOP
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    14 hours ago

    I’m pretty sure orange and cherry are named after the fruit, but Blackberry is true.

    • toynbee@lemmy.world
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      12 hours ago

      The source for this is old reddit threads, so hardly authoritative, but supposedly the color orange was actually named after the food item.

      • Denjin@lemmings.world
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        11 hours ago

        Yes indeed. Before we had “orange”, and also “purple” everything was just “red” which is why we have red onions and red cabbage that are anything but red and several species of bird are called red despite being clearly orange coloured.

        • naught101@lemmy.world
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          9 hours ago

          linguistic rules override physics pedantry.

          Idk why, maybe because I’m a scientist, but this speaks to something in my soul

          • I thought briefly about editing that to say, “in this context”, but I thought it might be redundant.

            It’s like the whole fruit/vegetable debate, and there not really being a scientific category of “vegetables” that aligns with the common usage. However, in common usage, the loose, lay definition of “vegetable” is far more useful than the scientific, taxonomical one.

            Context is king.

        • egrets@lemmy.world
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          12 hours ago

          Actually, the color is named after the fruit. It wasn’t until the late Middle Ages that we discovered anything other than the redcurrant that was red in color. Poppies, for example, were only discovered in ~1917, and we only found out about blood in the 1970s.

          • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
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            10 hours ago

            Dear Mr Encyclopedia, when were raspberries discovered? Wasn’t Avalon “the isle of apples?” When did Christian bibles start describing the forbidden fruit as “apples?” Were they not red apples?

            What color did they call ripe ribe avu-crispa (a gooseberry)?

            • egrets@lemmy.world
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              54 minutes ago

              The Biblical fruit is just given as “pərî” and could be any fruit. Avalon is from the Welsh aflonydd, “peaceful”, so named because it was King Arthur’s vacation spot. Raspberries have not yet been discovered, at time of writing.

          • Denjin@lemmings.world
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            11 hours ago

            Are you seriously trying to claim that no human ever bled and saw the colour until the 1970s? LOL