heirloom tomatoes

[Timmah!]

With the English language being a hodgepodge of several languages, & there always being an exception to a grammatical rule, I don't know if it's correct or not. Will take your word for it.

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by dice

I suppose "pollinate" was someone's idea of a joke that would
appeal to undergraduates, but it also created an opportunity
to make students look ignorant for using the linguistically
rational spelling consistent with the word pollen: pollenate.

I guess I simply find the linguistic messiness of "pollinate" more
annoying than I find the joke funny.

Should I start thinking about whether or not I should continue posting in general so that if I err on spelling or word usage that I would escape being charged guilty of linguistically inconsistent communication?

[dice]

I think that a professor in the life sciences setting a standard
(that others in the field follow) making a linguistic mess of
scientific terminology *intentionally*, for a joke, is a different
situation than someone simply using words that are correct
"to the best of their memory" in an informal discussion. Even
another scientist mis-remembering how something is spelled
or correct terminology for some phenomona is not being
gratuitously perverse in his use of the language.

There is an aphorism from computer programming: "be strict
in what you generate, but be permissive in what you accept".

It means that when interfacing with some other program, your
program should try to conform as closely as possible to some
defined standard for communication, whether that standard is
an "application programming interface" (api), a network
communications protocol standard, or whatever, but that it
should be prepared for some variations from that standard
in the responses that it receives, because not all other programs
that use that protocol are going to have the same
implementation of that standard, but they still may be
providing enough information for the communication
to succeed.

If the most current standard for "hypertext transfer protocol"
(World Wide Web) is "http-2.4", for example, that is what you
send other programs that use the WWW, but if you get back
"http-2.0" responses, your program should deal with them
gracefully, rather than crash or necessarily abort the session
and report an error.

That is the situation with informal discussions such as those
we have here. We may try to be correct in our use of language,
but the real point is to communicate information, not to set
standards for others to follow in correct scientific terminology.
So "close enough" is "good enough".

Whatever academic person or group decided that "pollenate"
should be spelled "pollinate" was in a different situation,
because they were setting a linguistic standard for others
to follow, that they could enforce when grading papers, etc.
Arbitrarily using "pollinate" was failing the first part of the
aphorism: "be strict in what you generate" (linguistically
"strict" in this case).

Inspector Morse questioning a suspect:

"So where were you between 8 and midnight on Tuesday last?"
"Walking beside the canal."
"Did you see Professor Jones there?"
"No."
"Who did you see?"
"Various people. I did not recognize any of them."
"Did you notice any commotion, hear
any arguments, anything like that?"
"Well, there was one rather loud discussion, around 10 PM,
but I could not see who was involved or hear exactly what
they were saying. When I started toward it, out of curiousity,
I stepped in this pile of manure that I had not noticed in the
dark. By the time I cleaned it off of my shoe, the argument
had apparently ended, and I did not see who had been
arguing."
"What kind of manure?"
"Ummmm, dog? Yeah, probably dog."

[tomakers]

I think it's the difference between a noun and a verb, probably the Romans are responsible. Talk about getting off topic!!
JMO,
Tom

[amberroses]

English is a messy language and is not internally consistent or logical. I feel just fine with that

[remy]

Hi dcmtax,
I hope you didn't get scared off by all the responses on your first post!
Remy

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by remy

Hi dcmtax,
I hope you didn't get scared off by all the responses on your first post!
Remy

Agree with Remy.

I think you'll find that in quite a few threads someone will post something that clicks with someone else and then the thread goes off topic but usually does get back on topic.

Call it BDWAT ( biological diversity within a thread).

[pinakbet]

hi carolyn,

a friend of mine who is living in canada is asking me for a good determinate tomato. what determinate heirloom tomato would you recommend?

thanks

[KevinCT]

Originally Posted by Elliot

We are having this exact problem, here on Long Island. We have days over 90 and there is no new fruit being set on our plants.

Elliot
Long Island, New York

I'm on the other side of the sound, same issue. I do finally have a nice batch of small fruits on the vines, but still not a ton of tomatoes.

I've seen some people shake tomato plants to aid in the pollination, but it's been hot now for so long ,I assume that wouldn't help all too much.

[dice]

You can try buzzing the flower cluster stems with an electric
toothbrush (artificial bee) early in the morning, before the
temperature warms up completely. One poster living in Arizona
said he got some fruit set that way when mid-day temperatures
were over 100F. The idea is that some pollen forms at night or
very early in the morning, and you vibrate the flowers to get it
to fall down onto the pistil before the day gets warm enough
to chemically deactivate the pollen. (A leafblower on the plants
early in the morning might work for this, too. That is one way
that greenhouses pollenate flowers without bees.)

[amberroses]

If it is really hot and humid the shaking doesn't work, but it might work better in lower humidity. If the night temperature drops enough that can help too. It sounds like the northeast is having the same weather we have in Florida this year.