My mom claims that she calculated the date I would be born more accurately than her doctor did because pregnancy usually lasts the equivalent of ten menstrual cycles, whatever the length of that woman’s cycle usually is. For most women, it’s about 28 days, so gestation is about 9.3 months. The doc calculated a date based on that average. Ma knew her cycle was usually a little longer, so she predicted ten full months, and she was closer than the doc.
I’ve never fact-checked her claims about that. Let’s assume if anything was incorrect in that statement, it was my faulty memory as a narrator, not that Ma was lying.
The first one also has a phonetic component worth considering. The first two characters are pronounced Qíyì, followed by the character for fruit. The vowels are right. On the other hand, Mandarin does have a “k” and “w” so there could have been a closer match. Possibly, this word entered Mandarin through Cantonese or another dialect which didn’t or this other dialect does pronounce it much closer to “kiwi.” (Google translate only pronounces Chinese characters Mandarin-style.)
ETA: Was thinking too much about this or at least in the wrong way. Mandarin does have “k” and “w,” but it doesn’t have “ki” and “wi.”
If you break the third name down into two sets of two, you get “Chinese” or “China” followed by “gooseberry.”
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Do you have any idea what Chinese people would have called them, before they were ever exported to New Zealand and the New Zealanders decided they tasted kind of like gooseberries and decided to call them “Chinese Gooseberries”? I’d bet some people in China still call them by an old name…
I’m just a dabbler rather than an expert in Chinese, but…
I suspect the second name listed above is the old school name. It doesn’t seem to derive from non-Chinese usage and it is the official name on the Chinese wikipedia page. “Macaque Peach.” Maybe monkeys love the fruit (that’s likely regardless of etymology) or people decided that this was a peach that had hair like a monkey.
ETA: Just checked with a friend and yes, 猕猴桃 (Míhóutáo) is the original word. He has no idea about the etymology.
CBs were heavily selectively bred to produce KF. Calling a KF a CB is like calling a Labrador a wolf; it’s not strictly wrong, but it obscures more than it illuminates.
Zespri, on the other hand, can go die in a fucking fire. Ever more so because they taste rubbish.
Growing up in New Zealand we would regularly eat what we all called Chinese Gooseberries. To my recollection, they were identical to what is now know as kiwifruit. It may have just been the one variety of Chinese Gooseberries that we ate that became known as KF (a name that still gives me a cultural cringe).
To the people he’s actually speaking to (not the average American, but the average fool who still supports him), inducing labor on an at-term stillbirth would still be abortion. These people are ignorant of anything scientific, can’t stand the possibility that women are full humans with requisite agency, and generally lack the capacity to grasp nuance.
I’m clearly not a true Kiwi then, despite having lived there my whole life, voted in every election since I was 18, bred part of the next generation, etc.
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