Friday December 14, 2007
A lot more bananas
IN Mind Our English of Dec 6, and also some time earlier, Fadzilah Amin answered questions about nomenclature relating to bananas.
One of the impressions I received from her answers is that “a hand of bananas” is the same as “a bunch of bananas”. I am just reading her answer literally. She may not have meant that.
Well, if you take a look at this website:
tis-gdv.de/tis_e/ware/obst /banane/banane.htm ,
you will see it says:
The banana plant develops a false trunk (pseudostem) composed of leaf sheaths, from the center of which there emerges the apical flower and fruit spike ...
The banana spike is known as a bunch. A bunch is composed of a series of hands. The individual fruits are called fingers.
The following terminology is used:
1 banana = 1 finger
5-7 fingers = 1 cluster
15-20 fingers = 1 hand
8-14 hands = 1 bunch (= 200 bananas)
So, clearly, a bunch has a whole lot more bananas than a hand. In fact, a bunch consists of several hands.
For added dramatic illustration, listen to Day-O, one of Harry Belafonte’s well-known calypso songs about a banana harvester bringing in from the field, “6-foot, 7-foot, 8-foot bunch”.
The same website quoted above also provides pictures of the various components of a bunch of bananas – from a single finger, through a cluster, a hand, to a whole bunch.
– I. Ho
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