Fighting about words

 Fighting about words

By Bobby Neal Winters

Is a tomato a vegetable or a fruit?

A lot of time has been spent--not to say wasted--arguing this point. We think of fruit as being sweet, and a tomato is not sweet, so one would then argue it’s a vegetable. And the argument goes round and round, unresolved.

This is because the question is set up wrong.

First of all, this is not an either or sort of question.  It’s what is called a “false dichotomy.”  The world of objects is not split into disjoint sets, one of which is fruit and the other vegetables. What we have here is different sets of nomenclatures coming into conflict.

When we talk of vegetables, it is almost always in the context of food for human beings. We think of a meal as being constituted of meat and vegetables.

Fruit, by way of contrast, is the name of part of a plant, that is the fleshy part of the plant that contains the seeds. 

So a tomato is both a fruit and a vegetable.

This may disturb you, but this is just logic and using a dictionary.  If you are disturbed, hold on to your horses, it gets worse. 

An apple is a vegetable and a fruit as well.  So is a grape; so is a banana.

The devil lies in the word vegetable, because vegetables are just parts of plants that people eat.  We don’t speak that way in English, though.  We like to give fruits a special place--because they are sweet for the most part--and refer to fruits and vegetables.  But in reality we are just singling out fruit as a special kind of vegetable.

Another question that suffers from a bad set up is this: Mickey’s a mouse; Donald is a duck; Pluto is a pup. What is Goofy?

Here we are referring to classic Disney characters.  Characters they had long before they became the Borg of the entertainment industry and acquired Marvel, Star Wars, etc, etc.

It was a much simpler world made complicated by a deliberately bad question.

Mickey, Donald, and Goofy are characters who interact with each other. They possess the ability to speak what appears to be English to each other, though be it in annoying accents.  They are natural creatures who are caricatures of human form.  To put it in Greek and make it sound scholarly, I could say, Mickey is an anthropomorphic mouse and Donald is an anthropomorphic duck.  Pluto is still a pup, but Goofy, with this nomenclature in place, is an anthropomorphic dog.

As Disney has taken its Star Wars intellectual property and made all sorts of new back stories in the setting, do you think they would ever go back and create a mythology of how Mickey, Donald, and Goofy attained the power of human speech but how little Pluto was left out?

We now come to what is to me a more serious matter:  The story of Jonah and the Whale.

Any serious Bible scholar will know that the Bible doesn’t refer to the creature who swallowed Jonah as a whale, but as a fish. However, in popular telling of the story it becomes a whale.

Here’s the thing. It makes no literary difference to the story: Being swallowed by a big fish and being swallowed by a whale are exactly as dramatic as each other. It makes no theological difference to the story: Jonah prefigures Jesus with the time in the belly of the fish/whale as the time in the tomb.

This is a pointless argument from every dimension.

But more so pointless because at the time of the writing a whale would’ve been considered a fish because the ancients (the ancient people in general and the ancient Hebrews in particular) had a completely different way to classify animals that we do. Linnaean taxonomy was far in the future; DNA after that.  Distinguishing fish from mammals was not one of their major problems.

Considering they were sheep herders who had very little business to do with the sea, I think they left a remarkably large impression on the world.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.