The phrase "comparing apples to oranges"

How is this even a rebuttal? They're both fruit. They both have peel. They both have fiber and citric acid. Out of all of the billions of things in the world, these are the ones which ended up in a phrase about comparing completely different things? Surely a better phrase would have been "comparing typewriters to jellyfish" or something like that. 

This is like comparing Rob Halford and Elton John.
(They're both fruits with appeal.)

The phrase is probably a variant of an earlier phase "compare apples to oysters." The dissimilarity is a lot more obvious in that phrase, but I expect people found it puzzlingly dissimilar and so substituted another fruit. In any event the problem is not just with the foodstuff employed, but with the current and older meaning of the verb to compare. Currently compare is used to describe a critical process of evaluating two options or objects and contains the implication that there are not only similarities to be found but differences. Compare has thus absorbed some of the meaning of the phrase we all know from essay questions: "compare and contrast." But at one time to compare had a meaning of to equate, which explains why one would need "compare and contrast," instead of just "compare." In that sense the statement that you cannot equate apples to oysters or oranges makes good sense. In common use as a rebuttal in debate, it implies imprecisely if poetically, that an argument that would be valid if it were applied to one situation (apples), cannot be used to validate a proposition about another situation (oranges) because it is too dissimilar. Of course you can still require your opponent to specifically show why the particular dissimilarities the phrase implies make the argument invalid.

Apple's and Orange's...

 
 
 

 
Or this?
 

The "standard" for dissimilar items is usually Chalk and Cheese.  Apples and Oranges is used as a rebutal where the compairee has made the basic mistake of grouping two items that may be similar in nature but have dissimilar properties which make any comparison invalid.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Becan

My pet peeve is "re-inventing the wheel". As if that were a bad thing. Maybe a round rock on a wooden axle was the epitome of wheel design, but I'm glad there's been some reinvention over the years.

Moshkiae
Hi,
 
As usual, the replies are just like ... Apples and Oranges!

Sweet and easy to carry around?

 
I could never remember the proper lyrics to The Bell-ends of St Clements

The one that gets me is "it always happens in threes" and the lengths people will go to "prove this".  I know a few people who get really annoyed when you point out the fact that other than when a group of three people are killed by a bomb or something simultaneously, most things happen one at a time. I have an ex that used to always wait until a third celebrity had died to bring out the "it happens in threes" and get highly offended if you pointed out some provable fact like she missed a celebrity that also died during that period , making it four.

Starise
Apples to oranges...is that like comparing Bapu and Mooch?

Check!

Apples are harder and noone ever makes a cider out of oranges.....Bapu is probably the Orange. Just a guess with a 50/50 chance of being correct.

Starise
Apples are harder and noone ever makes a cider out of oranges.....Bapu is probably the Orange. Just a guess with a 50/50 chance of being correct.

Just look for a naval orange with moobs.

bapu

craigb
Compare and contrast are like becan and eggs, ya?

The chicken was involved, the pig was committed.

I suppose the chicken got the better end of the stick... until dinner time; Rotisserie Chicken. 
 
 
Chicken with becon stuffing, wrapped in becon and cooked to perfection. Served with potatoes and corn cob. {Mmmmm} 
 
 

 

 
The same molecule gives oranges and lemons their different smells. Although the chemical constituents are identical in both species, they are actually a mirror image of the other (i.e. they are optical isomers, or 'achiral').