Apples and Oranges

What is it about “apples and oranges” that blunt or end discussions when someone uses comparisons to make a point? This idiom is not necessarily universal, however, because in other languages (and culture for that matter) we find variations of the same theme. It is honey and butter among the Welsh, potato and sweet potato among the Spaniards, British English says chalk and cheese but in Serbia it is grandmothers and toads but the weirdest is in Romania where they say, the grandmother and the machine gun.  The French think it is apples and pears, although the two fruits are actually the most closely related.  This is from a country that tries very hard to be different in more ways than one.  But the French artist Paul Cezanne was so preoccupied with apples and oranges that he painted the subjects obsessively compared to his other points of interest.

As a yearning naturalist wannabe (I would have been a willing deck hand on the HMS Beagle when it sailed to the Galapagos) I’ve concluded that all living things have deep seated comparative senses in all of us, even plants.  Flora and fauna are conditioned to compare. One of Darwin’s not so well known discovery was on his study of finches (species of birds).  He found out that finches in the Galapagos evolved into several branches from a single species as they adapt to changes in or availabilities of food sources in the environment they inhabited.  Beaks lengthened or shortened and even reconfigured to deal with different seeds and nuts. I try to imagine two sub species of finches perched on a branch in animated conversation - chirping and twitting, if you will. I think I know how it always ends.  One finch will inevitably invoke, “but that’s like comparing nuts and seeds”.

       Is that how biases form and begin? Finches, of course, have no choice because natural selection forced their hands, or rather their beaks to choose seeds or nuts or grasshoppers.  Birds, however, are great at comparing when choosing their mates.  The females do the choosing and that’s the reason that male birds are the ones with the most attractive and flamboyant plumage.  So when peahens pick different mates we know that’s because they do compare.  Scientists are perplexed about how they do it or even come close to deciphering what goes on in those bird brains since all the males vying for their attention all look so elegantly and daintily beautiful.  The female selective instincts must be decidedly compelling because peacocks (only males can be called that if you haven’t noticed three sentences ago) spend a lot of their resources to look magnitude-of-ten prettier than the peahens.  Keep in mind the attractive peacocks make themselves garishly visible to predators so it is with great peril as well that they stand out. But it is all worth it because their prospective mates are predisposed to compare “apples and oranges” when discussing why they pick their mates one over the other.  Actually they use the phrase as a bragging tool about their choice and a put down of the other female’s pick.  Of course, only the idle mind can come up with this conclusion, completely fraught with runaway imagination.

            So to every gentleman out there, be not so worried that you may not be the apple of her eyes. If she happens to like oranges you’d glitter like the three golden apples Hippomenes, in Greek mythology, threw to the ground to win the race against the huntress Atalanta who was the faster runner but couldn’t resist stopping and picking up the throw-down fruits. Having lost the competition, Atalanta agreed to marry Hippomenes. You see that was the deal the hard-to-get Atalanta had agreed to with her father who decreed that she marry someone. She did agree but she would only marry the man who can outrun her in a foot race. Until Hippomenes - albeit with cunning subterfuge which sometimes men are wont to do - no man could. Now you know.

            On a sweet and sour note (apples and oranges), it was Aphrodite who gave the golden apples to Hippomenes, hence, we now have the word aphrodisiac. Now you know even more (if you didn’t already). Only an idle mind can go from “apples and oranges” to finches and Hippomenes to Atalanta and aphrodisiac.

Inevitably this takes us to Atlanta, Georgia. Supposedly this southeastern city was named after Martha Atalanta Lumpkin who was the daughter of the former state governor Wilson Lumpkin.  The story goes that J. Edgar Thompson, then the chief engineer of the Georgia Railroad Co., picked the middle name of the governor’s daughter for the then bustling railroad hub, which today is a major airline hub as well.  I don’t know how one letter (“a”) got dropped to give us the current Atlanta spelling.  As a matter of fact, I also do not know how a name associated with apples was picked for this major city in a State that is actually associated with peaches. I can’t go any further.  At some point idling has to stop.