Here’s a headline-writing tip for October: “Gourd” fits on the page more easily than “pumpkin,” and lends itself to more puns (“Wicked gourd-geous”).

If you work at a newspaper, you’ll get sick of the word before November rolls around.

All well and good, but is such headline synonymy accurate?

I think of gourds as funky-looking inedible little things, while pumpkins are big and orange and usually edible (especially the seeds, roasted; mmmmmm!). Should the words really be used interchangeably?

This pressing question came to mind when I was desperate for a column topic – er, I mean, when I was seeking the best way to serve my readers. In my puzzlement I turned, as I have so often in the past, to UNH Cooperative Extension expert George Hamilton.

Hamilton’s expertise is so vast that last year he judged two world-champion giant pumpkins in the course of a 24-hour period – one at Deerfield Fair, then the next day the first-ever one-ton pumpkin at Toppsfield Fair in Massachusetts.

The answer to my question is yes, he said, but don’t get anal-retentive about it.

“It’s a real blurry line,” Hamilton said. “It gets into the aspect what is true botany classification vs. a legal definition vs. what people call it.”

Botanically, there’s no question. A gourd is any member of the family Cucurbitaceae, which includes things like watermelon, zucchini, and cucumbers, as well as pumpkins and the things I call “gourds.” The major characteristic is a relatively small number of large edible fruits, or at least edible-ish, that have hard, thick skins.

So it’s accurate but vague to call a pumpkin a gourd – like using “cat” instead of “mountain lion,” a move that any headline-writer on deadline would condone.

Legally, it’s less certain. In 1893 the U.S. Supreme Court ruling Nix v. Hedden declared tomatoes to be legal vegetables rather than fruit as part of a fight over whether they should be charged import tariffs. (Vegetables were charged, fruits weren’t.)

Botanically, as a pulpy product of the plant that holds the seeds, tomatoes are definitely a fruit. But the court decided that common usage should hold sway – and since people mentally classify tomatoes alongside potatoes rather than oranges, they were declared a legal vegetable.

I don’t know of any court rulings about Cucurbitaceae, but Nix v. Hedden is still the law of the land. If I asked a judge to rule whether “gourd” is a synonym for “pumpkin,” I’m not sure what would happen, because common usage says gourds are little decorative things rather than raw material for jack-o-lanterns.

Actually, it turns out, there’s a more interesting question about pumpkin terminology: Are they squash?

Botanically, no – the two are just cousins. But the distinction is fading due to cross-breeding, Hamilton said. “A true pumpkin has an angular stem, a 5-sided stem. Your squash stems are round,” he said. “But now, with your new inner-species hybrid, that is falling apart.”

In fact, those giant pumpkins we gawk at every fall are actually squash: “If you look at their stems, they are a round stem,” Hamilton said.

The ruling bodies of giant-pumpkin world has decided to overlook this issue in the name of popularity – “come see the giant squash!” doesn’t have the same ring to it. As long as the monstrous fruit are orange or white (no green skins) and not rotten, they can compete.

And with that, I have to say we have cut the gourd-ian knot.

GraniteGeek appears Mondays in The Telegraph. David Brooks can be reached at 594-6531 or dbrooks@nashuatelegraph.com. Also, follow Brooks on Twitter (@granitegeek).