I never really played it when I was a kid, but knew all about it from The Beano and Oor Wullie.

I know kids have a lot more money these days but I refuse to believe they are swinging two smartphones together instead of conkers.

Mind you, it's much more likely the two phones involved would be mine and my wife's.

I mean if it's a school where they also have to carry laptops and use digital schedules I don't think it makes a difference, but it's a good first step.

One issue was that each phone also has a camera, so people would seek out / make trouble on purpose, spy on people and post it online, etc.

I understood that was a myth created from a few isolated instances and the medias general desire to wind people up. I don't know why it has died out mind.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211018040605/https://www.hse.g...

Quote: "Realistically the risk from playing conkers is incredibly low and just not worth bothering about. If kids deliberately hit each other over the head with conkers, that's a discipline issue, not health and safety."

Certainly there was at least one school that got goggles for pupils to wear while playing: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cumbria/3712764.stm

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/dec/09/conker...

This was usually because it became a tool for bullying: deliberate hand hits in games, deliberate hand hits in other contexts with complaints of an attack fobbed off as “we were playing conckers and there was an accident”, and so on.

Also like any playground sport there were gambling issues (I'm not sure if they were serious issues, or just if some schools took them too seriously, but I remember there being a glut of warnings about it when I was in secondary level education, around the same time as some bullying concern related bans).

Kids will be kids and bullies will always find an excuse to pick on someone if they want to. Just deal with it one-off when a game gets out of hand and let kids play games and learn social skills along the way.

It was more banning the tool without which the game can not be played, but yes as someone who was subjected to bullies at various times in my education history I can say you are right about them just finding something else.

I didn't say it was right, just that it happened.

The problem that causes these ineffectual bans is simply that the school's head (and other authorities) feel the need to be seen to be proactively doing something, anything, about the bullying problem they otherwise officially deny having¹, especially when local press have got onto the issue and are stirring up angst amongst the parents, and when they can't think of anything better a target is picked and a simple ban gets announced.

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[1] It always amazed me how soon after a claim that we don't have a bullying problem in the school, there would be a call to celebrate an action that was supposed to reduce the bullying problem we didn't have…

   In 2004, several schools banned conkers due to fear of causing anaphylactic shock in pupils with nut allergies. Health advisers said that there were no known dangers from conkers for nut-allergy sufferers, although some may experience a mild rash through handling them.[20]

e.g. a Peanut is a seed, as are almonds, cashews, walnuts.

Very few people using the word "berry" are discussing scientific classifications. It would be worse, not better, to make terms more scientifically precise. Berry refers to small juicy fruits, often in bright colors.

Yes they are

> tomatoes and bananas are

No they’re not.

The word “berry” is much older and more fundamental to language than the technical botanical definition that a tiny minority of people know or care about.

Strawberries aren't berries and tomatoes are. You can say that's wrong all you like, but in the context of how they are botanically classified rather than what we named them you're incorrect.

If I made up a new, niche meaning of already-existing words, and tried to claim everyone else was using them wrong, you would think I was crazy.

People do this all the time, though it makes me feel old rather than crazy.

They have never heard of object-oriented programming and yet, they're not wrong. You're the one who is wrong by assuming the terms made up by a niche field override common language used by everyone.

I get the point that we call them berries even if they aren't, but your comparison to OOP is apples and oranges.

That wasn’t the point. The point is that they are berries, by the real definition of berries, which is not the different definition used by a tiny minority of mostly irrelevant people in a specific context.

What reason is there to prefer the botanical definition to the common one (that says a berry is a small colorful fruit)? I can see none. On the other hand, I can see many reasons to prefer the common definition: it is older, it is used by far more people, and it more closely corresponds to what we care about in real life (because almost everyone spends more time preparing and eating meals than they do classifying plant parts, so the culinary meaning is more important).

Scientists are not in charge of the whole human experience. They do not get to decide on behalf of everyone else that the salient defining characteristic of berries is not how they taste or what dishes you would use them to prepare, but rather what part of the plant they come from.

I take issue with this, and in fact we can see how the pedantic scientific meaning caused confusion about the actual underlying facts: people with allergies to what are commonly called "nuts" can in fact be allergic to things that according to the pedantic scientific definition are "seeds". So the OP is actually wrong to say it shouldn't be an issue for someone with a nut allergy!

Though it would make my day if someone tells me they can't have peanuts because of a legume allergy.

An apple is a pome but an orange is a hesperidium. Different things entirely.

And while I know my son can safely play with conkers, we most certainly have not tried to eat one!

There's also some things with nut in their name. c.f. Nutmeg, coconut.

As others have mentioned, same kind of deal with 'berry'.

And to follow up, if you're travelling abroad it's worth noting that some countries have different naming structures/separate out the families of 'nuts'. So be careful if you're asking if something has 'nuts' in, there can be a language barrier. e.g. tree nuts vs. Lupins (peanut family).