What IS a Pluot Anyway?

Mr. Bee has been bamboozled by a hybrid fruit. He was with me at the grocery when I bought four pluots; the on-sale fruit of the week. He was intrigued. He was concerned. He was baffled and borderline distraught that a supposedly new fruit had been invented without his input. So we had a short scientific in-store discussion on how sometimes apples don't just love apples and oranges don't just love oranges and that the lowly, little, purple bundle of joy imbued the very best of both of his parents; the plum and the apricot. Crisis averted. I talked him down. Or so I thought.

But it must have been weighing heavy on his mind because he asked me twice over the weekend who the pluot's parents were again. And I explained it again. Twice. So when I handed him one for this afternoon's snack and he asked me the third time, I decided to change my tactic. I told him in drawn out exaggerated tones that it was a p-l-u-o-t....a cross between a pluuuummmm and a .......what? He thought for a minute and replied.."An umlaut*?" Heavy sigh...I give up. . I just said that that was correct (in a 'good boy tone' of voice)-rather than go through it all again- and that I thought that the umlaut harvest was going to be especially bountiful this year. I'm just glad that I didn't buy them back in the days when the pluot was actually marketed as "Dinosaur Egg" fruit. I think we'd still be talking about it over at the supermarket.


*(Umlaut-A "double dot over a letter". The double-dot (called a diuresis; the letter-symbol combination is called an umlaut) is the correct, German way of writing the word; the ue, oe or ae letter combinations are a way of representing the umlaut in non-germanic alphabets which lack the umlauts.)