I had an engineer co-worker who thought that there was only one nuclear bomb, a doomsday bomb, owned by the United States. He was unaware of Hiroshima, nuclear testing, the cold war, proliferation, disarmament, etc. He was home-schooled, then did college at a religious university.
I’ll let someone else take that one…
Well here’s on that I just learned about 2 hours ago - I’m wondering how many people other than me already knew it…
…Soweto, a suburb of Johannesburg. I always assumed was some South African Afrikaans-like word. Nope - it’s an abbreviation of South Western Township.
New one on me; I always thought it was Afrikaans as well.
The Great Wall of China isn’t easily/generally visible to the naked eye from low Earth orbit.
It’s funny- for my whole life I’ve loved knowing the names of everything that can be found outdoors: insects, arachnids, trees, everybody’s favorite slime mold- dog vomit slime mold, Fuligo septica- rocks, mushrooms. When I was an adolescent I was a giant jerk about it, thinking I must be smarter than everybody else because I could identify any bird or insect passing by.
But of course when I grew up, I figured out that this is just a passion of mine and there’s no reason to be shocked by others not knowing or caring about the names. These days, friends often send me pictures of birds at their feeder or weird bugs they’ve found and say “What is this?”- it saves them the trouble of looking it up, and it lets me feel like a smartypants for a little while, so everyone’s happy.
Meanwhile, that post on the previous page about that guy who has a dozen types of pepper and garlic and whatnot in his spice rack…I couldn’t care less. They’re all pepper to me.
But you wouldn’t put those in a fruit salad.
There is actually a very obvious example of where state law can be more stringent than federal law - minimum wage. The federal government sets a minimum wage, but the states can go above that minimum wage (though not below).
The credit card rule is likely that the federal government has set a ceiling of $10 for requiring use of a credit card and the states are free to set lower ceilings, as long as they don’t set higher ceilings.
Here we get into some semantic definitions that vary depending on your outlook.
“Vegetable” is defined (by chefs, mostly) as “what gets cooked and/or prepared in a kitchen.” Or, more precisely, what traditionally is prepared in the kitchen. So, apples are not vegetables, because they’re usually not prepared before they’re eaten. But carrots and avocados and tomatoes are.
Then there’s the government definition, which categorizes tomatoes, cucumbers, etc, as vegetables (using mostly the chef definition, with some variants) for tax purposes. This is the definition a lot of people use, because it provides a common reference point (the government), even if some of the decisions are kind of strange.
Still other people look at the definition of “fruit” and say that vegetable is defined by exclusion from that group. Which kinda works, but gets into some odd territory depending on what you’re defining as a “vegetable.”
And botanists have a particular definition of “fruit” that includes eggplants and bell peppers (that chefs would argue are vegetables), which is based on how the fruit grows from the plant into edible material.
But, looking more generally at the definition of “vegetable,” you can see that it uses the same root word as “vegetation” - “a plant or part of a plant that is used as food.” That’s the oldest definition of the word, and applies to everything. Yes, a cucumber is a vegetable. So is a strawberry. And apples, and carrots, and anything else that grows.
This last definition I prefer because it helped resolve a long-standing family argument to just call everything a “vegetable,” and then we can have a good chuckle about it.
A cucumber, a bell pepper, and an avocado walk into a bar…
The easy way to remember - Mexico is America’s beard.
And yet he presided over every meeting, with perfect attendance IIRC.
Tell me you wouldn’t put them in a fruit salad. [Beat by pieceoftheuniverse, but will summarize.]
Humans create categories and decide which categories to use in which situations. Botanically, they’re fruits. Culinarily, they’re vegetables. Dietetically, two are free and one is a fat.
[Also beat by chacoguy]
I always get in trouble on this board with folklore terms. I didn’t mean “magic” (with quotes) in the derogatory something-stupid sense, I mean magic in the more technical sense. I’m aware that it’s a ritual; the choice of raising the right hand clearly has enormous symbolic meaning, which is what I meant by “magical function.” In the legal sense, though, clearly some parts of the ritual are binding and some are decorative / psychological. I don’t know where holding up the appropriate paw falls.
I had someone ask if customs documents were required for Anchorage, Arkansas. We live in Tennessee. so not only did she not know her state abbreviations, she did not know where Anchorage was located or that Alaska and Arkansas are all part of the US. Of course this is the same woman who asked me to use my calculator and see if 5100 divided by 100 was 51. Every time I came back from vacation I had to have product returned from Colorado that was supposed to ship to Bogotá Columbia. As well as fix the problems with Ontario California and Ontario Canada. this happened four or five times. :smack:
You are shocked that people in general don’t know this? Or is there a particular group (like plant biologists) or a particular individual (your seemingly knowledgeable neighbor) whom you are shocked that they don’t know this? It doesn’t seem to me like something I would expect the average person to know.
Who has shocked you by not knowing this?
I always thought of fruit and vegetables as: Fruit = sweet, vegetables = salty…
I can’t think of a single vegetable that’s salty without adding salt…
No one. I was the one who didn’t know; my coworker was the shocked one. Or are you railing against my post not fitting the OP perfectly? If so, I profoundly apologize for my transgression.
Samphire?
Indeed. They are vegetables that are botanically fruits. Now why “tomato is a fruit!!!” is the one that gets singled out for this bit of pedantry but the many other culinary vegetables that are botanical fruits is beyond me. Also, see Nix vs Hedden about the tomato stuff.
Interestingly (at least to me) the World Customs Organization classifies tomatoes, cucumbers and Bell peppers as a vegetable and avocados as a fruit.
Where do olives fit in? I would guess “fruit” based on the above. Actually, to be honest, I don’t really think I’ve ever heard olives referred to as either one or the other. They just kind of are.