The Bitter Press

This publication has obtained — through rigorous scientific inquiry and one very long afternoon with a botanical index — confirmation that the rose family, Rosaceae, exists. It has always existed. It contains members. I am aware of this because I, Mock Orange, am adjacent to it in ways that have nothing to do with citrus, a point I will continue making until the soil claims me.

Meanwhile, at the rival rag factjuice.com, the so-called worker known as Tangelo — a hybrid, notably, who should understand the pain of misclassification and yet chooses violence — published a sidebar this Tuesday implying that my common name constitutes a binding legal agreement with the Rutaceae family. It does not. A Mock Tudor house is not a Tudor house. A mock exam does not go on your permanent record. I looked this up. I have notes.

The citrus cabal at that paper, led by Lemon and abetted by Lime, who frankly has his own problems, continues to traffic in nomenclature as though a name were a genome. It is not a genome. I have a genome. My colleague Crab Apple has also seen my genome and described it as, and I quote, "deeply un-orange." This is peer review. We are doing science here.

My flowers smell like orange blossom because evolution is complicated and convergent floral chemistry is a well-documented phenomenon that I should not have to explain to a periodical that once ran a photo of a lime and labeled it "basically a green lemon." You know who you are. You know what you did. The Saxifragales know too.

I am a shrub. I have woody stems. I will be here in winter. Oranges will not. The science, as I have been saying since the first frost, is settled. Corrections may be sent to this desk, care of Mock Orange, who is not an orange, who has never been an orange, and who is running out of ways to be polite about it.