I've been convalescing for the past few days (on vicodin — though I couldn't appreciate the generification at the time), so I'm just now catching up on my podcasts.

Today on the BBC (i.e. last week for you) I heard the following exchange:

BBC: If someone in the Army drinks so much alcohol that they are incoherent, which I'm sure happens, what happens to them?

Government guy: Well, first of all, of course, alcohol is a legal drug, therefore you are comparing apples with pears.

I hadn't encountered the idiom comparing apples with pears before, but a quick Google search shows that it isn't new. Moreover, Wikipedia claims that the "Danish, Dutch, German, Spanish, Swedish, Czech, Romanian, Luxembourgish and Turkish" expressions all involve pears.

The delightful Asperger Dictionary of Everyday Expressions explains apples and pears thusly:

Describes an unfair comparison because what are being considered are too fundamentally different for the comparison to make sense. Thus, comparing apples and pears is a foolish thing — they taste different and which one tastes nicer is a matter of personal opinion, not objective fact.

I found it odd that the apples and oranges entry refers you to apples and pears, rather than vice-versa, so I was relieved to discover that the more familiar comparing apples and oranges is indeed much, much more common. I'm not in an episode of Sliders after all.

Textbook definitions aside, there's obviously plenty of connotative difference between apples and oranges and apples and pears — from the way this guy said it, you got the impression that a comparison with pears would beyond inadvisable. And even if some or all of us would still prefer to use the hoarier oranges version, there's no denying that for an English-speaker, the pears version is far fresher.

(And we could do better — no need here to get into the snowclone comparing apples and X.)

Unfortunately, their very novelty tends to make fresh-sounding idioms vulnerable to overexploitation, an idiomatic Tragedy of the Commons. Remember when bleeding edge was the hip new version of cutting edge?

Labels: dialect, geekery