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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
Crab apples, or crabs, are the wild bunch of the apple genus Malus. They represent at least 30 of its species, all but the one species we call just apples. The true value of crab apples has been known for millennia; it is one of the nine plants entering into the venerable Old English Nine Herbs Charm. But they can be sour or astringent or woody, or as one sermon I found put it, “viciously bitter”. But from that to crap apples: that’s going too far.
I didn’t get much of a straight answer when asking Google for the root words for crab apples. It’s not too clear where the word comes from nor what it means. They might better be called “quite small apples” or “sourish apples” or even “not so goods”, but not “crap”. One hopes the writers are making reference to high fibre/fiber content, some of them being rather woody, and hence their value in regularity.
Photo site:
Crap Apple Tree Featured
Blooming Trees Featured My Crap Apple Tree. I am so so happy.
(http://www.redbubble.com/people/katseye … e-featured)
Chinglish site, China Daily:
All the rooms in the restaurant were named for beautiful flowers. The Crap Apple room
http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/redirect.p … o=lastpost
Home Builder Inc – Truth in Advertising?:
Crap Apple Cove Condominiums
(http://www.michaelnoskoinc.com/michigan … condos.asp)
By the way, following the pattern set by Kem’s poem, there is no mal in Malus, despite what the Bible might lead you to believe. The name comes from Gk melon, for yellow.
What else has had its reputation besmirched? The Crap Nebula. The Hubble telescope does shows it to be quite untidy (link, or here in X-ray)
How were the elements formed?
the star begin to be destroyed, the huge pressed leads to the burning of the element inside the center of the star and the huge star turns into super nova which explodes in hours, through these hours all elements bigger than 26 began to be formed, after that the super nova explodes, and the matter spread rapidly (10,000 km\second) the remains becomes a nebula e.g. crap nebula was a super nova which explodes in 1054
Astronomical observations:
I first checked out M1, the Crap Nebula. It seemed sort of washed out and not well defined.
(http://www.observers.org/reports/97.02.08.4.html)
See also maybe the “crab/crimp/cramp menagerie”: http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/forum/view … hp?id=3710
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“Crap apple” seems to be a frequent error. A classic eggcorn, ripe for the picking.
Is “crap apple” what we mean by low-hanging fruit?
In a failed attempt to recover his health, Thoreau took a two-month train trip to Minnesota the year before he died. A botanical goal of his first and last western excursion was to locate stands of native crab apples. America’s most famous naturalist knew the mythology of the crab apple, but he had never touched one-they were not indigenous to his native Massachusetts. Thoreau found a small thicket of them in a rocky pasture that was a few miles from the Minnesota home where he stayed.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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