Yes, I know it's a fruit, but what does that mean?

I've been bouncing an idea around in my head lately, about the differences between fruits and vegetables, and most importantly, how they are defined. It started off as a small question, "If a tomato is a fruit, because it has seeds, then why isn't a bell pepper a fruit too?" Nick and I started theorizing and somewhere in the past week we've decided that it has to do with the way in which pollination occurs, like if it's a flowering plant, and the fruit itself spreads the seeds (like an apple), or if it is a flowering plant wherein the bugs pollinate the flowers, creating new life.

Turns out we were wrong, but closer than I thought because we had some overlap between the culinary definition and the botanical definition.

According to wikipedia, fruits are the ripened ovary, together with the seeds of a flowering plant. Which basically means that most everything we eat is considered a fruit. However, according to culinary lingo, fruits are those fleshy bits that are sweet and tasty, like apples, pears and oranges.

The best part of the entire discovery was reading about vegetables, because it turns out there is no scientific value to the term vegetable.

"Vegetable is a culinary term. Its definition has no scientific value, and is somewhat arbitrary and subjective."

I was so confused about the difference(s) between the two that I almost looked it up last night at 3am when I couldn't sleep.

Now I can rest easily knowing that vegetable is an arbitrary term and essentially meaningless except in terms of deciding what I want for dinner.