Um… yeah, about that…
TOPICS OF THE TIMES; Economic Bananas
JULY 12, 1989
Have countries threatened with retaliatory tariffs under the new trade law entered into negotiations with the United States? S. Linn Williams, deputy U.S. Trade Representative, says: ‘‘There are discussions. We can call them negotiations. They can call them a banana as long as it produces results.’’
Banana? It’s an economic euphemism with precedent. During the Carter years, a nervous White House enjoined Administration officials not to mention the dreaded word ‘‘depression,’’ or even ‘‘recession.’’ Alfred Kahn, the chairman of the Council on Wage and Price Stability, got the message. The next time he wanted to warn of economic trouble, he talked about ‘‘the worst banana you ever saw.’’
Washington’s semantic worries haven’t changed much since then. For months the Federal Reserve Board has been keeping interest rates high, out of concern over rising inflation. Now it appears to be acting instead out of concern over recession. Last week the Federal funds rate dropped a quarter-point, to 9 1/4 percent. The Fed’s chairman, Alan Greenspan, will be asked about the future course of Fed policy when he testifies before Congress later this month. Even under probing questioning he’ll probably maintain a cryptic, statesmanlike position, something like: ‘‘We have achieved our goal of moderating the economy.’’ In other words, banana.
a banana is a banana is … not a parsnip
I agree.
Thanks for the post. It’s a quite an obsessive celebration of Musa.
“Curved yellow fruit” is still too complicated for the xkcd 1000 word checker. https://xkcd.com/simplewriter/ Try instead
“bent yellow food”
It is believed that some of them may have ended up in the Canary Islands, though other authors believe that the bananas in the Canary Islands.
Pray tell, for glob’s sake! What about the 
in the Canaries? What are they hiding?
That bit of the article (being generous, actually the whole thing is) is a blatant copy paste from wikipedia… this is the missing rest of the sentence:
…had been there since the fifteenth century and had been introduced through other means, namely by early Portugueseexplorers who obtained them from West Africa and were later responsible for spreading them to the Caribbean.[5] African bananas in turn were introduced from Southeast Asia into Madagascar by early Austronesian sailors.[6] In 1888, bananas from the Canary Islands were imported into England by Thomas Fyffe. These bananas are now known to belong to the Dwarf Cavendish cultivar.[7]
More exciting banana curved yellow fruit related information here:
I just looked at the sentence, saw that it was obviously cut off and immediately went to the wikipedia article.
It’s sad really.
Kant might say, pickles a priori.
Funny you should mention that, because I was recently reading that many fruit - in particular the banana - get their distinctive smell/taste not from the fruit itself, but from the yeast decomposing the fruit. Someone took beer yeast, made them more like banana yeast, and the end result was, just from the alteration of the yeast, a beer that was described as being like an intensely flavored banana milkshake. (It was not considered a success, oddly.)
Let’s pause and remember why we look at, just look at bananas…
Shopper: Where are your bananas?
Grocer: Sorry, we don’t have bananas. I can point you to the curved yellow fruit if you’d like that instead.
Come, mister tally man, tally me curved yellow fruit!
Oh my, it can look back.
