this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2025
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But bananas are berries. It's fun to learn things.
What underlying fact does that teach you? Only that botanists categorise fruits a certain way. Learning that word doesn't teach you anything about bananas, does it?
Well, it taught me that berries have a strict botanical meaning rather than just being and cute little fruit on a bush, and that there can be multiple meanings for a word based on context. There's nothing wrong with calling a strawberry a berry even while understanding it's not really a berry. Correctness is important in formal discussions, but we can have fun being intentionally wrong in everyday speech where poetry and history hold more value.
From there one asks, "What is a berry? What about a banana makes it a berry? And what is a strawberry if not a berry?" And so one reads and one learns. "What about a raspberry? What about grapes?" The internet is as forthcoming with answers as one's brain is with questions.
It's not wrong at all. If you look up "berry" in the dictionary the first definition will most likely not be the botanical one.
But everything else you described as learning is all about language and the sociology of science, not facts about fruit itself.