Meaning of bananahood | Babel Free

Definitions

The property or state of being a banana, chiefly in various idiomatic contexts.

rare, uncountable

Examples

“Ordinary, non-metaphorical, exemplification is unproblematic. All of the instances of exemplification considered so far are non-metaphorical. The paint chip literally can exemplify the property of being teal since it literally is teal. The banana literally exemplifies bananahood since it really is bananoid.”

“Hobbes is denying here that there are real objects, often called “universal”, which underlie our uses of language. Take bananas. We routinely apply the term “banana” to certain specimens of curvaceous yellowish soft fruit. Someone who believes that the world really contains universals will hold that there is a universal property of bananahood, which all bananas possess. But, for a nominalist like Hobbes, the only property which all bananas possess is that of being called “bananas”.”

“It would be no less reasonable if we decided to aspire to perfect, pure bananahood.”

“It is funnier for a second banana to play the lead than for a lead to pretend to second bananahood.”

“As a result, after a few iterations, the memory concept “banana” is fully activated and the memory item is retrieved. Moreover, in the presence of spontaneous fluctuations of the activity, different aspects of “bananahood” will flash up. The basic idea of memory retrieval discussed here is at the heart of models of working memory and long-term memory (see chapter 13).”

“For me, the idea of 'bananahood' encapsulates many of the driving questions about the way we understand ethnicity in the contemporary world. It bespeaks the possibilities of ethnic identification and acculturation which are not automatically tied with racial appearance.”

CEFR level