bananahood

English

Etymology

banana +‎ -hood

Noun

bananahood (uncountable)

1. (very rare) The property or state of being a banana, chiefly in various idiomatic contexts.
   • 2003 September 2, James O. Young, Art and Knowledge‎^[1], Routledge, →ISBN, page 73:

     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.

   • 2008 January 7, Glen Newey, Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Hobbes and Leviathan‎^[2], Routledge, →ISBN, page 39:

     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”.

   • 2008 November 25, Phillip Hill, The Observation Car‎^[3], Lulu.com, →ISBN, page 66:

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

   • 2012 December 4, Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2013: 25th Anniversary Edition‎^[4], Andrews McMeel Publishing, →ISBN, page 86:

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

   • 2016 November 4, Michael A. Arbib, James J. Bonaiuto, From Neuron to Cognition via Computational Neuroscience‎^[5], MIT Press, →ISBN, page 203:

     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).

   • 2017 March 2, Lena Dominelli, Walter Lorenz, Beyond Racial Divides: Ethnicities in Social Work Practice‎^[6], Routledge, →ISBN:

     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.

See also

• bananoid
• banananess