Jicama

Last night I went out to dinner with Brittany and we chatted about our weekends/days and she told me about a new fruit she had tried from the grocery store "JI-cam-a," which she accurately described as looking like a potato but tasting a little more like a bland apple. Now, I wouldn't expect someone to get the pronunciation correct as "Hee-kah-mah" if they've never heard of it before, but I did think it was pretty obvious that most of us don't describe it as a fruit. Even worse, when I said it was a little more like a potato in that it was a tuber, Brittany stared at me blankly, never having hear of tubers before.

I just mentioned this story to my officemate, let's call him B.J., and he too had never heard the word tuber before. Looking things up in wikipedia it does seem like the definition of tuber and root vegetable is a little more complicated than I previously thought, but it still looks to be an entirely pedestrian term that I thought most educated people would have heard.