The idiomatic phrase “comparing apples and oranges” is often used to describe an effort to compare two things that are thought to be so disparate as to make any attempt at juxtaposition futile. However, despite prevailing beliefs, it is actually possible to compare an orange to an apple. In fact, from a linguistic and etymological perspective, the fate of apples and oranges has been intertwined for centuries. Be prepared to have your core (or pith) beliefs challenged.

Apples were one of the earliest fruits to be cultivated by human beings. The word “apple” itself is Germanic in origin. In Old English, an æppel referred to any kind of fruit including, but not limited to, those to which we now refer as apples. Cucumbers, melons, and many other fruits and vegetables were simply called “earth-apples”. In other words, apples are a sort of Jungian “everyfruit”; an orange by any other name, at least in the Middle Ages, was just an apple. In fact, in some languages the term for orange derives directly from the term for “apple”, a parallel that indicates that comparing the two is not only possible but implicitly suggested by their etymology. In classical Latin, p?mum referred to any fruit; in fourteenth-century France when oranges were introduced, consequently, naming everything “apple of something” was in fashion (hence pomme de terre, a.k.a. “apple of the earth” or simply “potato”).

Unlike “apple”, the word “orange” holds the unique distinction of referring to both a noun and an adjective, as well as rhyming perfectly with absolutely nothing. Orange entered Middle English from the Old French and Anglo-Norman orenge. The orange tree itself can trace its roots back to northeastern India and southern China, where Sanskrit-speakers pulled from a variety of Dravidian languages  and christened it naranga. From there, the word entered Persian in the Middle Ages as n?rang. After being introduced in Italy, bitter Persian oranges were grown widely in Europe, and rebracketing caused the initial n of the word to be lost, forming what came to be known as arangia in Italian.  Arangia worked its way by word of mouth to England, where, ironically, it was re-christened pomme d’orenge by Franco-Brits after the medieval Latin pomum de orenge. But by the time Portuguese traders brought the first sweet fruits from India in the early 16th century, the English had taken to simply calling them “oranges.”

Unlike oranges, which had to be slowly introduced to European cultures by various traders, apples are by far the most ubiquitous fruit throughout European history. Over centuries of human cultivation and consumption, apples have been designated as the objects that delineate a general state across cultural and linguistic barriers. The English language in particular contains a number of apple-related metaphors; for example, the figurative usage of “the apple of one’s eye” to mean something or someone that is of particular significance to a person dates back to Old English and in fact is a reference to Psalm 17:8 of the Bible: “Keep me as the apple of your eye, hide me in the shadow of your wings.” Despite the fact that in the Jewish Talmud, the forbidden fruit from the Garden of Eden was variously identified as grapes, figs, and wheat, in the post-classical Latin tradition the forbidden fruit was transformed into an apple, possibly as a pun between m?lum (apple) and malum (evil). Oranges, on the other hand, have not inspired quite as many idioms. Other than compare oranges to apples, the only other thing we seem to do is “squeeze the orange,” a.k.a. take the full value of something. Oranges are, however, the stuff of various pop culture references; both a clockwork and the new black, the once-scarce fruit and its distinctive hue are now as common in popular culture as the apple.

Over the course of centuries, as differentiation between fruits and vegetables has become essential, the once-universal association of apples with every form of produce has narrowed to a singular type of fruit. Concurrently, our usage of the word apple in idiomatic expressions has expanded to cover a vast range of situations, from “the apple never falls far from the tree” and “How do you like them apples?” to the French tomber dans les pommes (to faint; literally, “to fall among the apples”) and the Spanish dar una vuelta a la manzana (“to walk around the apple”, a.k.a. the block). While apples have narrowed in their referential ubiquity, they have expanded their reach into colloquialisms. Likewise, as the English language has standardized, we still have not managed to come up with a satisfactory rhyme for orange; we have, however, incorporated the oft-edited concept of orange into popular culture. Perhaps, given their similar etymological evolution and cultural significance, we should stop regarding apples and oranges as disparate altogether. Such comparisons are fruitless.