It is not a “mistake”, it’s just two separate meanings of the word fruit. I find it annoying that some technical field assigned a meaning to a term that had already in wide use for hundreds of years and then people started claiming that people using it in the original way are “wrong”.
A more extreme version is what I call the Stonehenge cycle:
- humanity names something, e.g. Stonehenge,
- humanity finds other, somewhat similar things, and names them similarly, e.g. Woodhenge, Seahenge,
- people studying the field realise that the term has become so broad as to lose any meaning, and attempt to create a tighter definition of what a thing is - e.g. a ‘henge’ is ‘ a roughly circular or oval-shaped bank with an internal ditch surrounding a central flat area’
- the original thing no longer qualifies under the new definition, e.g. Stonehenge is not a ‘henge’.
Comments
Sorry I did exclude those fruits which people typically mistake as vegetables like tomatoes. Otherwise the list would have been too long.
It is not a “mistake”, it’s just two separate meanings of the word fruit. I find it annoying that some technical field assigned a meaning to a term that had already in wide use for hundreds of years and then people started claiming that people using it in the original way are “wrong”.
It’s surprisingly common.
A more extreme version is what I call the Stonehenge cycle:
- humanity names something, e.g. Stonehenge,
- humanity finds other, somewhat similar things, and names them similarly, e.g. Woodhenge, Seahenge,
- people studying the field realise that the term has become so broad as to lose any meaning, and attempt to create a tighter definition of what a thing is - e.g. a ‘henge’ is ‘ a roughly circular or oval-shaped bank with an internal ditch surrounding a central flat area’
- the original thing no longer qualifies under the new definition, e.g. Stonehenge is not a ‘henge’.
It's weird for olives to be excluded though. They've never been considered "vegetables" as opposed to "fruits".