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Saturday, September 22, 2007

From the Eyes of Babes

I admit that little things amaze me. Aly said, "why is orange juice yellow?" She's right, of course, it is yellow, but because the name is "orange" juice I've never thought of it as yellow. In fact, when I looked at it, I had to convince myself that it WAS yellow and not a shade of orange. Amazing how compelling a misconception is; this small one didn't take much to overcome, but you can imagine how difficult big ones would be to overcome.

4 comments:

overthinker said...

i think it depends on the brand you buy.

i'm not running to go look at all the orange juices though so i can't defend my positon.
neither can you offer proof against it though.

haha/

Rob said...

Actually, I can. Those that are orange use artificial colors to achieve that color. The rind of an orange is orange, but the juice is not.

haha-back :)

The point of the post, was of course, the power of a misconception and outright deceit. It wasn't the intention of whoever pasted the uninspired name of "orange" on our favorite citrus fruit to confuse us as to the color of the juice, but it does. Imagine how compelling a purposeful deceit can be?

Take evolution, for example. It continues to crumble beneath its own weight, and even though your average joe isn't able to even understand it, he'll defend it.

Anonymous said...

It's called "orange" juice because it is the "juice" from an "orange", not because of the color of the juice. I don't think the the makers of OJ (not Simpson) are trying to deceive us. I think that we think that the color should be orange because of the name.

Rob said...

Yeah, that's my point. And still it's a mind shift to accept, so intentional deceptions, or even big unintentional deceptions are hard to kick over (I don't think evolution is an intentional deception, but it fit so well with the emerging humanistic view that even though it is unsupported, it still persists).