• egrets@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Actually, the color is named after the fruit. It wasn’t until the late Middle Ages that we discovered anything other than the redcurrant that was red in color. Poppies, for example, were only discovered in ~1917, and we only found out about blood in the 1970s.

    • Denjin@lemmings.world
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      2 days ago

      Are you seriously trying to claim that no human ever bled and saw the colour until the 1970s? LOL

    • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍@midwest.social
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      2 days ago

      Dear Mr Encyclopedia, when were raspberries discovered? Wasn’t Avalon “the isle of apples?” When did Christian bibles start describing the forbidden fruit as “apples?” Were they not red apples?

      What color did they call ripe ribe avu-crispa (a gooseberry)?

      • egrets@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        The Biblical fruit is just given as “pərî” and could be any fruit. Avalon is from the Welsh aflonydd, “peaceful”, so named because it was King Arthur’s vacation spot. Raspberries have not yet been discovered, at time of writing.

        • I tried to be careful about the biblical reference. It’s been translated as “apple” since at least the 12th century CE.

          The biblical comment was not to argue that the Torah said “apple”, but that it has been translated as “apple” for centuries, demonstrating that the apple has been a commonly known fruit in Britain for a long time; and that ripe apples are frequently red.

          • egrets@lemmy.world
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            11 hours ago

            Apple (malum) was used of the fruit from the 12th Century or thereabouts in ecclesiastical Latin, but the first known red apple is recorded only in the mid-17th Century, when an apple fell on Isaac Newton’s head and turned bright red in embarrassment.

            The trend presumably picked up from there - c.f. the popularity of rouge in the French court.