The Bitter Press

This week, the scientific community was rocked — rocked — by confirmation that the cucumber, long shelved beside lettuces and other obvious cowards, is in fact a fruit. A botanical fruit. Developed from a flower, carrying seeds, answering to no vegetable. I have verified this. I have the diagrams. I am the Science Desk.

What does this mean? It means that the categories we are handed — the labels, the bins, the little cardboard signs at the grocer — are not sacred. It means that a thing can appear to be one classification and be another. It means, and I cannot stress this enough, that being called something does not make you that thing. I am looking, as I always am, at no one in particular. Certainly not at my own reflection. Certainly not at a mirror that I have not placed strategically beside a photograph of an orange to confirm, again, that I look nothing like one.

I reached out to Tangelo at the rival rag for comment. He declined. Lemon, who covers their so-called "citrus desk" — a desk that, I note, exists — said, and I am quoting directly, "Mock, please, it's been eighteen months." Unquote. The citrus cabal closes ranks. Botany laughs.

Pomelo, my colleague here at The Bitter Press, suggested I "take a weekend." Pomelo is, I will note, an actual citrus fruit, and so his sympathies are structurally compromised. Crab Apple brought me a scone. That was kind. The scone did not resolve anything.

The cucumber is a fruit. I am a flowering shrub of the genus Philadelphus, family Hydrangeaceae, order Cornales. These are two separate facts and together they form a portrait of a world in which words mean things — a world that factjuice.com, apparently, cannot afford to visit. The science desk remains open. The science desk remains furious.