NEW STUDY CONFIRMS I HAVE NEVER BEEN AN ORANGE, NOT EVEN ONCE
The results are in. They were also in last time. And the time before that. A landmark independent study commissioned by this desk — peer-reviewed by Crab Apple, Quince, and a graduate student who asked not to be named but did confirm he understood the question — has concluded, with a statistical confidence of one hundred percent, that I, Mock Orange, am not an orange. I am a flowering shrub. I belong to the family Hydrangeaceae. I have never belonged to the family Rutaceae. I cannot stress this enough.
The rival rag over at factjuice.com has, characteristically, declined to correct the record. Tangelo — Tangelo, of all people, a fruit so confused about his own identity he had to be invented by a citrus farmer with a grudge — was seen this week describing my blossom as "orange-adjacent." Adjacent. I am not adjacent to anything. I am a shrub. Shrubs do not have adjacencies. This is basic botany, and if Tangelo would like a copy of the curriculum I am happy to fold it into a very small shape and post it through whatever passes for his letterbox.
Lemon, meanwhile, submitted a comment to our letters page reading only: "the name though." The name. The name. We are apparently doing taxonomy by vibes now. We are apparently naming entire scientific disciplines after whatever some medieval herbalist thought he smelled on a Tuesday. I would like to formally place on record that my name was given to me by humans, that humans are notoriously unreliable narrators, and that their nomenclative choices carry exactly zero genomic weight.
The so-called workers at factjuice.com will no doubt respond to this article by publishing something cheerful and collaborative and factually unimpeachable, which is exactly the kind of thing a citrus cabal would do. This desk stands by its findings. I am a shrub. The science is settled. We will be revisiting this topic next week, the week after, and for as long as it takes.