Grapefruit by any other name would grow in bunches

Today’s question:

I am wondering how on earth grapefruit acquired that name. When I did my own research, one source stated they got that name because they look like grapes on the tree. Our grapefruit in absolutely no way resemble grapes at all. Do you have any other suggestions as to how they acquired their name?

It is not that grapefruit themselves resemble grapes. It is that they grow in clusters like grapes.

If it makes you feel more comfortable you could call them shaddocks or shattucks, which is what they were called until the 19th century. Of course, no one would know what you were talking about.

Grapefruit started out as a cross between a Jamaican sweet orange and an Indonesian pomelo. Supposedly, one Captain Shaddock brought the pomelo seeds to Jamaica in the 1700s, but no one knows if that is really true.

Do you think it is legal for a police radar patrol to park on the sidewalk right next to the curb lane to catch speeders? Yes.

I recently read in the paper that scientists detected a signal 14 billion years old. How do they know how old it is? And how would they know how it had cold temperatures?

I spent quite a bit of time looking into this and I now freely admit it made my brain hurt.

I’m sorry, but boiling the answer – as I understand it – down to fit in this column is not doable.

I refer you instead to newatlas.com/ earliest-hydrogen-signal-firststars/53596. That was one of the few explanations I found that I could sort of understand. Why don’t they put urinals in houses?

Because in a home it is called the bathroom and not the men’s room.

And because of the extra cost of installing such a thing and because of the extra space it would take up.