The following article by Chris Tribble discusses the uses of the word berry as a suffix in the (Manchester) Guardian Weekly.

Hard times for soft fruits

In June, the Guardian Weekly reported that in Britain "the strawberry season is at its peak, but growers complain that a shortage of foreign fruit pickers is crippling their businesses". Add to labour problems the effects of the bad weather that beset England earlier this summer, and British strawberry lovers risk going unsatisfied.

So is it just the strawberry season that holds a special fascination for this paper or are there other soft fruits and berries that it picks from? Guardian Weekly includes mentions of at least nine kinds: strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, cranberries, blueberries, mulberries, bilberries, whortleberries, whimberries and gooseberries.

We seem to like them because so many of them grow wild, so they can be picked for free, and made into jam, and the go well with cream. While the total mentions of berries of all kinds, at 737, is far short of apples and pears (apples alone get 946 mentions), they remain integral to British summer.

Of course, a shortage of strawberries is not really a crisis. Over the past ten years the Weekly has reported on, in descending order of frequency, shortages of food, water, fuel, teachers, staff, labour, power, skills, electricity, housing, cash and energy.

Meanwhile the paper has reported complaints about all sorts of things - most commonly government policy or action, lacks of various kinds, the police, and then issues of treatment, conditions, discrimination, harassment, mistreatment and abuse.

Compared with a shortage of water or fuel, a shortage of strawberries is clearly not a major cause for complaint. Might there also be some stranger varieties lurking among those 737 mentions of berries?

Looking more closely at the data, I find that I've made a couple of analytic errors. First, blackberries haven't been mentioned so frequently just because they are a favourite hedgerow fruit. They are high up on the list because they are also a popular and widely reported hand-held telecoms device.

I also notice that among the summer fruits I've counted there is the never-out-of-season Burberry and Shakespeare's figure of fun Dogberry. A rose is a rose , but a berry, it seems is not always a berry.