I was walking along the river when I first noticed that the salmon berry blossoms had begun to shed their pink leaves and reveal tiny, green drupelets. “Premature berries” I thought to myself. But premature seems like the wrong word and slightly off-putting.
If premature literally means: “happening, arriving or occurring before the proper time” then it doesn’t apply to these berries that, while not yet ripe, are actually developing at an appropriate pace.
Now if you were to try to eat the berries at this point, we might say that you have eaten them prematurely.
And if you were to conceptualize eating a berry as how that berry occurs or even how it is born, then the whole situation is decidedly premature. But perhaps most disturbing, by this particular logic, premature children are perhaps simply being eaten too soon.
But this does get me thinking about the word born. Born is a past participle of bear which, when not referring to a large mammal, means “to carry”.
Which begs the question, should the baby once born (the mother no longer bearing it), simply be referred to as “released”?
In which case, I might ask you what your release date was.
Which, importantly, is not to be confused with the day they let you out of prison.