What Is the Meaning of This Fruit?

The peach and the lemon, greedy little misers. They may pretend to be the gentle beacons of a colorful and idyllic countryside, with the birds and the trees and the elderly men leaning on pitchforks and chewing stalks of wheat, but in reality they are spiteful creatures secretly controlling a definition dictatorship. By what rule are they the only fruits allowed to take on secondary, non-fruit definitions, while the rest are destined to languish in the niche obscurity of bushes and orchards? It’s just not fair. When an entire class of words possesses so many distinct and evocative personalities, as the fruits do, we cannot permit a select few to prevent the natural seeping of those varied identities into the outside world.

Peach and lemon barely begin to encapsulate all the possible meanings fruits can convey, and they certainly can’t claim to have excelled in the fruit-transcending arts to such a degree that no other fruit could dare match their brilliance. The peach, aside from its official duties as a peach, gets to be “any attractive and enjoyable thing” for no legitimate or justifiable reason other than that peaches are also attractive and enjoyable. That’s feeble, peaches. Any fruit could come up with something that lame. A strawberry could just as easily be an attractive or enjoyable thing, but the closest a strawberry gets to having another definition is as a style of bruising, which is slangily nonstandard.

The peach’s non-fruit definition is so obvious, unmemorable, and unimpressive (like naming a dog Doggie or naming an airplane Melissa) that it has become almost entirely sarcastic. “She’s a real peach” has never been genuine, but that mocking use does little to undermine the sovereignty of the peach, much as the aura of ramshackle quality does little to undermine that of the lemon. These are strong secondary definitions, much more interesting than a simple positive context would be, and watermelon would kill to have either.