I’m sorry guys - this may be a very stupid question - hehe.
I remember this thing where you are supposed to ask someone to count from 1 to 20, around 20 times (something similar to that - can’t really remember the details), and then right after they finish counting, you ask them to name any particular vegetable.
The answer most often comes out as “Carrot”.
I’ve tried it on several people, and all of them have answered carrot (except on one occasion - one person somehow managed to answer watermelon ???).
Aparently almost no matter what you do, people around here seem to pick “carrot”. Another amusing one tries to make it Freudian by asking you to add 3 and 3, multiply 2 and 3, etc.
It just seems to be the default vegetable. Penn&Teller even use it in their book “Playing in Traffic” where you can make a guardian vegetable materialize over someone’s photograph (the book includes a dopey cartoon carrot with wings).
I’m almost positive this has been discussed around here before though.
Well, when you hear numbers and you think of the word carrot, you are really associating it with the word ‘karot’ has in, “this ring is 20 karots”. It works with almost any number because our society has been conditioned to associate numbers with karots.
Well, this is just my WAG, and it’s a theory someone once told me when I asked the same question. It makes sense to me anyway.
pepperlandgirl: Sometime, try just walking up to people and asking them to name a vegetable, without any preface. If they haven’t heard the trick before, they’re still liable to answer “carrot”. On the other hand, if they are familiar with it, a lot of folks (hey! Why are you looking at me like that?) will say “zuchinni” or “rhubarb”, just to be different.