CompuServe Thread

It appears that something in your upbringing has led you astray with respect to how an orange is properly consumed. Learned people, dare I say learned peoples, typically cut an orange in half, and eat it with a pointed spoon, in this way preserving as much of the delicious juice as possible. The apple/banana fruit (for it is growing increasingly indisputable that these are but two names for a single entity) is eaten with all its integrity. Some varieties of apple/banana have an internal residue, which common usage calls "the core," while other varieties have an external residue, which common usage calls "the peel." This simply reflects the difficulty of the folk mind in grasping the abstract; for "the core" and "the peel" are simply manifestations of the common apple/banana fruit property "inedible residue." On another tack, some primitive people, I dare say primitive peoples, eat an orange by rolling the intact body on a suitably flat surface until all the internal structure is "mooshed up." This realeases all of the juice. The savage then pierces the top with his or her thumb, and by a slovenly combination of squeezing and sucking, _drinks_ the orange like some botanical poptop soda. Attempting this manoeuver on an apple/banana leads only to tears. (We should know; our inventive party members have attempted it 15,000 times without a single success.) Finally, if all the keys on your typewriter broke except the 'A' and the 'B,' you could use the alternate spellings "ABBA" and "BABABA," and be more or less intelligible. No combination of these letters will encode "orange." Even the exotic pineapple ("BAAAB-ABBA") is closer, lexically speaking. [Tongue in cheek as I grasp at straws.]