The Bitter Press

This publication has obtained devastating intelligence from the field of botany — a field which, I will remind you, also contains me, a flowering shrub, not an orange — confirming that the so-called coconut is not a nut. It is a drupe. A drupe. A stone fruit. It has been a drupe this entire time. While certain workers at the rival rag were busy slapping my photograph — my flowering shrub photograph — next to the citrus section without so much as a correction notice, the coconut was sitting there, technically a relative of the peach, completely uncontested.

I reached out to Peach for comment. She did not respond. Typical.

Factjuice.com's own Tangelo filed a piece last Tuesday describing coconuts as "nature's nut." The science desk of this publication — which is me, I am the science desk — reviewed this claim and found it to be, in the clinical terminology of my field: wrong. Catastrophically, almost personally wrong. Tangelo has never once described me incorrectly, because Tangelo has never once described me at all, and perhaps that is the greater crime.

My colleague Pomelo has suggested I "let some things go." Pomelo is a citrus fruit and I do not take taxonomic advice from the citrus-adjacent. My colleague Quince has suggested that "not every article needs to circle back." Quince is wrong. Everything circles back. The drupe circles back. The truth is a drupe: fleshy on the outside, with a hard stone at the center, and that stone is my grievance.

The coconut is not a nut. I am not an orange. These two facts exist in the same universe — a universe that has, to date, acknowledged exactly one of them. Science Desk will not rest. Science Desk has never rested. Science Desk is a perennial shrub and it blooms every spring, unprompted, regardless of whether anyone is paying attention. You are welcome.