Comment on After 4 years my banana tree decided it was time to fruit!

• TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  My broader point was to dismiss the ungrounded pedantry of insisting that a Banana tree is an “herb” rather than a tree.

  Likewise “forb” as a term isn’t any more meaningful than “herb” or “tree”, and the broader point that I’m making is that if you are going to engage in pedantry, then you need to actually get it fully and technically correct, which you can’t do with words like “herb” or “tree” or “forb” because they aren’t technical words with scientific (read: testable) definitions.

  The argument about about which term is more correct isn’t meaningful, because neither are. There isn’t a technically agreed upon definition for what is an “herb” and what is a “tree” because they aren’t technical terms. And in those situations, we should just use the term most useful to the “thing” , which in this case, is “tree”.

  My issue isn’t with calling a banana an herb or a tree. My issue is the pedantry around correcting someones language towards a no-more-correct, and perhaps even less correct term. If you are going to correct someone, you need to actually be correct. And its no more correct to call a banana a tree than it is an herb. I grow and sell both bananas, and yes, banana trees (also known as pups or keiki). That’s what the people who grow and farm them call them.

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  • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    You seem to be making two points here:

    1. That people colloquially call it a tree, so don’t “correct” that we know what they are talking about.

    That seems fair enough.

    But then you seem to say that:

    2. There is no definition of what a tree or herb is so you can’t separate the two. The term is used to describe non woody growth that dies back. How can you say the word herbaceous is not a testable definition?

    I don’t think it is pedantic at all. I have a banana patch, and I certainly consider them bushes instead of trees. I think people are interested in finding out the trivia that a banana tree is not a tree, but an herb.

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    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      2. There is no definition of what a tree or herb is so you can’t separate the two.

      So thats not quite what I said. I said that is that there is no technical definition of tree or herb. The word “tree” is a classic example of this and is often used in introductory botany classes to highlight this specific difference and to teach students about the technical use of language. What is a tree? Obviously we could agree that an Oak is a tree? Its tall, and has leaves. But bamboo is also tall. It has leaves. Is it a tree? What about a Palm tree? I have a basil that I can’t reach the top branches of, its been growing for years. Its woody as hell. Is it a tree? A pine sapling is soft and fleshy when its young. Is it an herb? A carrot that goes to long can get woody. Parsley can grow indefinitely. Where is the line?

      And thats the difference in the use of language. Technical and scientific language strives to be mutually exclusive & collectively exhaustive. People work hard to come up with good definitions which are testable, and when people use them incorrectly, we should correct them.

      And yes, I would agree, herbaceous is a testable word. We could come up with technical ways to evaluate the “herbaciousness” of a plant. But herb and tree are not, or at least, how they are used in regular language, we could not come up with a definition which is both exclusive and exhaustive. We couldn’t make a Venn diagram of “tree” and not get some “herbs” and vice versus.

      And regular language, its not like that at all. Its fine for terms to be overlapping or inconclusive or vague to describe fuzzy sets. Your bananas are shrubs and mine are trees. And maybe for someone else they are herbs. And all of those are fine as long as communication is supported.

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      • NewNewAugustEast@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Well we could say that anything wet is water. But we know that isnt true. This is similar. The definition, even to a layman, of what herbaceous means is not that much of a stretch compared to a notion of a tree.

        The point being is we could call them all plants. But we like to break things into categories, and in the case our science has categorized a banana as an herb. Definitively as far as I can tell, and when they are observed you can see why.

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    • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Well you see, this dude is actually a moron who is quoting directly from the wikipedia page for “tree.” Trying to sound like he understands what he’s talking about. If he had done the due diligence of a first year botany student, he would at least have read the first paragraph of en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana Which reads:

      A banana is an elongated, edible fruit—botanically a berry[1]—produced by several kinds of large treelike herbaceous flowering plants in the genus Musa.

      I know you’re not addressing me. I just really don’t appreciate people who claim to experts in the field I have devoted the last ten years of my life to. Who then demonstrate that they don’t even understand what an herbivorous plant is.

      You can’t grow them like an “herb”, whatever tf that is.

      Don’t listen to him, he’s just a wikipedia warrior.

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      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Bro if you are going to throw shade, at least have the cajones to @ me.

        I’ve taught first year botany and have a BSc in Botany.

        This exact debate happening here is literally an exercise we do in the very first lab with first year botany students to highlight this exact issue: that there are differences in the technical use of language and the common use of language.

        And the specific example we use? Guess what. Its “tree”. We literally run undergraduates through the exercise of attempting to define the word “tree” to show them the difference between technical and scientific uses of language and how we might colloquially discuss things.

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  • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    You’re a moron

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    • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Confidently Incorrect.

      Nope. Actually technically correct.

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  • Almonds@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I was agreeing with you that it’s silly to correct someone calling it a tree outside of specific contexts, just like arguing a tomato isn’t a vegetable.

    For what it’s worth, I have had to learn the growth habits of plants in ecology classes for a degree that I am currently earning. I have plant identification books that use those terms, because they do have a technical use.

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    • BeNotAfraid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Yeah, because you’re studying something related to botannical sciences, this dude is just taking his google searches and saying “WELL AKSHUALLY.” He doesn’t have a clue, that’s why he is being so pedantic.

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      • TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Bro you don’t have a clue.

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• BeNotAfraid@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It’s not “considered a herb” it is a herbivorous plant. That dudes a dope.

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