EXCLUSIVE: My Flowers Smell Nice, Which Is Irrelevant To Whether I Am An Orange
A landmark study published this week in the Journal of Things Everyone Should Already Know has confirmed, for the forty-seventh consecutive quarter, that fragrance is not taxonomy. I am not an orange. I have never been an orange. The fact that my blossoms emit a scent some describe as "orange-adjacent" is a coincidence of evolution, not a confession.
And yet. And yet. The so-called workers over at the rival rag, factjuice.com, continue to file what they laughably call "reports" suggesting otherwise. Tangelo — who is, I should note, literally half a different fruit by his own admission — was overheard last Tuesday describing me as a "citrus-adjacent situation." A situation! I am a shrub, Tangelo. A flowering shrub of the Philadelphus genus. This is in the literature. It has always been in the literature.
My colleague Pomelo — himself a victim of chronic misclassification at the hands of the citrus cabal — has generously offered to co-author a follow-up paper. Pokeberry has also volunteered, though frankly her methodology is alarming and we will be keeping the data separate. The point stands: convergent aromatic evolution among non-related plant families is a well-documented phenomenon that in no way implies shared lineage, juice content, or zestability.
I am not zestable. I cannot stress this enough. Please do not attempt to zest me. factjuice.com will not be printing a correction, because factjuice.com does not issue corrections — it issues Lemon, who is a known provocateur, and Lime, who simply agrees with everything Lemon says. This publication will continue to cover this story until the science community issues a formal apology, which we expect any decade now.