Melonknock: Tapping a Watermelon as if You Knew What to Listen For

Melonknock (n.): the grave, expert-looking tap given to a watermelon in a shop by somebody who has no idea what a good one sounds like. It happens at sunny market stalls, in supermarket aisles and beside the big cardboard bins that appear every summer. You lift a melon, hold it close to your ear, rap it twice with a knuckle and nod slowly, like a doctor who has reached a conclusion.

A melonknock has a fixed order. First comes the selection, in which you choose a melon for no reason other than that it was nearest. Then the knock: two taps, sometimes three for a melon that seems to deserve a second opinion. Then the listening face, eyes slightly narrowed and aimed at the middle distance. And finally the verdict, which is either a small satisfied nod or a faint frown as you put it back and pick up the one beside it, which sounds identical.

The interesting part is what the melonknocker hears. The melon says something like tok. The next melon also says tok. A third, for variety, says tok. Somewhere in the family there was once an aunt or a grandfather who could tell things from this, and who chose melons that were always sweet, and the knock has been handed down from them with great care and without the instructions.

Melonknocking is contagious. One shopper knocks, and the next person at the bin, who had been planning to simply take a melon like a reasonable adult, finds a knuckle already raised. Nobody wants to be the one who did not check. On a busy Saturday a good display can sound like a small, polite percussion section warming up, each player listening hard to an instrument they cannot read.

There are advanced forms. The slap, delivered with a flat palm, is favoured by people who feel a knuckle lacks authority. The lift-and-weigh adds a thoughtful bounce in both hands. The full examination ends with a look at the pale patch underneath, held for exactly as long as it would take someone who knew what the patch meant. All of them lead to the same result: you buy a watermelon, and it is fine.

The real idea behind it

Growers and greengrocers really do tap melons, and there really is something to hear; the knock was not invented for show. What most of us inherited, though, is the gesture without the ear that went with it. We saw a parent do it, it looked like knowledge, and so we do it too, the way children copy an adult testing the bath water or squinting at the sky before deciding about a coat.

That is a perfectly good reason to keep knocking. A lot of everyday competence starts out as a borrowed movement that we perform long before we understand it, and a few of those movements never get their explanation at all. They stay with us as small ceremonies: proof that somebody once showed us how to choose things carefully. The melon does not mind. And every so often, by pure chance, you cut one open at home and it is perfect, and you say, with complete sincerity, that you could tell.