The word vegetable is an adjective in all of those instances, and we’re talking about the noun.
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Do you have evidence that it is currently commonly in use as anything other than a culinary or dietary term?
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When people refer to a hospital patient as a “vegetable,” they’re not remarking on his suitability for being incorporated in a stew.
EDIT:
Those phrases are compound nouns. In each, the word “vegetable” is a functional part of the noun. It’s not like “big” or “amazing” or “tall.”
Quite true. But hopefully people aren’t thinking that this definition of vegetable would be an option when deciding whether something like a tomato is a vegetable.
Not according to the dictionary.com:
You can see that they included vegetable fiber in there as an example of when vegetable is an adjective.
But I don’t want to belabor the point. I guess all I was trying to say is that when the this comment was made:
was that vegetable was no longer commonly understood to have that meaning.
I think this cite kind of shows that:
Hopefully, we can at least agree that rare does not mean common.
Looking back, what I should have said was that I don’t think anyone could find evidence of the word vegetable currently being commonly used to mean “non-animal life generally.”
Nothing is “according to…dictionary.com”; dictionary.com is an aggregator. What you’re actually citing is collinsdictionary.com. I’ll stick with the OED.
OED also lists vegetable as an adjective (in addition to being a noun of course). I included the cite I did because it happened to have a good example and was easy to link to. I must have missed the part where you provided a cite indicating that most people think that trees are vegetables. Unless your post is your cite.
Sorry, but http://mostpeople.com is a dummy website.
That’s OK; we’re all dummies here…
People fixate on the “fruits” because of the construction “fruits and vegetables,” which suggests equivalent categories. The idea that something is “really” a fruit even if we call it “vegetable” (the botanical false-correction of the culinary usage) can fit into this conception. But if a vegetable isn’t a fruit, no further analysis is called for, under the common formula; there’s no other place to put it.
The bolded part is certainly logical, but I think the only way to push that logic into the present language would be to start talking about “fruit vegetables” as the equivalent category to “root vegetables,” “leafy vegetables,” and so on. Or, of course, to drop the “vegetable” part and just speak of eating fruits, roots, leaves, etc. I’ll support you in whichever approach you take. 