Stupid Question ™
By John Ruch
© 2002
Q: Where do seedless
grapes and navel oranges come from when they have no seeds to plant?
—David Wachtel
A: This is a good reminder that we’re biased toward sexual reproduction, and that humans have been creating clones for thousands of years.
Very few major fruit crops are grown from planted seeds. Instead, they are grown from severed pieces of other plants, which then grow into a new plant or branch genetically identical to the “mother” plant. Which is to say, our fruits are clones.
(They are also usually hybrids—another method of asexual reproduction, in which grafting a bud or branch from one plant onto another results in a single plant with the characteristics of both.)
Cuttings rather than seeds are planted because fruit growers want to replicate their successful plants. As devices of sexual reproduction, seeds mix the genes of two separate plants and might produce a plant with undesirable traits.
Seedless oranges and grapes are actually products of natural genetic mutations.
Such mutations are fairly common and come in two types. In parthenocarpy, the plant spontaneously produces a fruit without its flower being pollinated. In stenospermocarpy, the flower is pollinated and seeds begin to form in the fruit, but fail to fully develop and exist only as an unnoticeable residue.
The navel
orange is parthenocarpic. The original navel orange tree was discovered in
Seedless grapes have been around much longer and are generally stenospermocarpic.
Q: What’s the origin
of the phrase “fucking A”?
—Filthy Mouth
A: This military vulgarity is from World War II. Beyond that, its origin is a mystery.
Now used as
a general exclamation or intensifier, it originally meant “indeed” or
“correct,” and later “wonderful” or “great.” (“We have fucking A weather in
The official guess is that it comes from the positive phrase “A-number-one.” This makes sense for the “wonderful” usage, but not for the original “correct” usage. It draws textual support from 1970s war memoirs that recalled its usage in the longer, more colorful and apparently nonsensical phrase, “Fucking A-number-one-well-told!”
However, various memoirs have other bizarre versions that go against any logical interpretation. (“Fucking-A-John-Ditty-Bag-well-told!” and “Fucking A doodle de doo.”)
It could be a reconfiguration and abbreviation of “abso-fucking-lutely,” a World War I military profanity also used to mean “indeed.”
It has also
been suggested by amateurs that the “A” is simply short for the classic
military “affirmative.” There’s no evidence to support this, but it has the
strength of logic.