Food Words and Expressions I Don't Like Because I'm Old and Cranky - Page 5

Ooo, don't forget that river near London, you know, the "Tems", spelled Thames
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ishbel 

Quote:

Originally Posted by gonefishin 

  Ishbel, do you pronounce Berkshire, Bark-shire?  I have always said Berk- shire

 

   A friend of mine has recently had a few business meetings in London and that's what one of the English gentlemen had told him.

 

     dan

Yes, it's Barksheer or Barkshah!

A few of the other pitfalls for foreigners include Leicester (pronounced Lester), Beauchamp (Beecham), Leominster (Lemster), Worcester (Wooster) and in surnames:  Menzies is pronounced Ming(as in sing)-us, Gilzean is Gillan, Cholmondley is Chumlee and Marjoribanks is Marshbanks!

Given I am from east Tn I have to go with Food Pump's Texan's definition  a "pee-can" is something you would pee in and the word pecan is pronounced like the letter "P" followed by cahn.

But you also have to remember that the Tn. and Tx. accents are very similar also note that some of our families were cut off for a long time back in the day due to traveling difficulties and some of use still use some of the old english language terms such as ye and various others, and yes I do say y'all as well as (and I'm gonna catch hell for this one) yuns as in "Are yuns comin er not!!" if meaning more than one person, if it's only one person I would probably say "Are ye comin er not?"

But that's just me 

Quote:

Originally Posted by PeteMcCracken 

Ooo, don't forget that river near London, you know, the "Tems", spelled Thames
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ishbel 

Quote:

Originally Posted by gonefishin 

  Ishbel, do you pronounce Berkshire, Bark-shire?  I have always said Berk- shire

 

   A friend of mine has recently had a few business meetings in London and that's what one of the English gentlemen had told him.

 

     dan

Yes, it's Barksheer or Barkshah!

A few of the other pitfalls for foreigners include Leicester (pronounced Lester), Beauchamp (Beecham), Leominster (Lemster), Worcester (Wooster) and in surnames:  Menzies is pronounced Ming(as in sing)-us, Gilzean is Gillan, Cholmondley is Chumlee and Marjoribanks is Marshbanks!

 

    Thanks for sharing.  I'll try and work on those...

  dan
 

Or......      what about Milngavie, Glasgow, prounced Mull gy?!

Or....

Or..

We could spend hours, here, Pete!

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by PeteMcCracken 

Ooo, don't forget that river near London, you know, the "Tems", spelled Thames
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ishbel 

Quote:

Originally Posted by gonefishin 

  Ishbel, do you pronounce Berkshire, Bark-shire?  I have always said Berk- shire

 

   A friend of mine has recently had a few business meetings in London and that's what one of the English gentlemen had told him.

 

     dan

Yes, it's Barksheer or Barkshah!

A few of the other pitfalls for foreigners include Leicester (pronounced Lester), Beauchamp (Beecham), Leominster (Lemster), Worcester (Wooster) and in surnames:  Menzies is pronounced Ming(as in sing)-us, Gilzean is Gillan, Cholmondley is Chumlee and Marjoribanks is Marshbanks!

 

But that's just me 

And several millions of other folk, Highlander.

Unfortunately, many urban southerners think their native tongue is rustic and unsophisticated and are making an effort to do away with it. Personally, I don't understand anyone who looks down their nose at their own roots---linguistic or otherwise. But it's an observable fact that they do.

It's a shame, too, that the joint influences of television and tourism are quickly destroying regional dialects and idioms. Indeed, as little as 25 years ago, in places like the Outer Banks and the Georgia Sea Islands, you could still find people who spoke in pure Elizabetean form. Alas, no longer.

Soon enough we'll all be talking with the flat, uninflected tones of TV newscasters.

Any recipe that has the term "preheat the oven" drives me nuts.

speaking of cooking terms in recipes that incite...how about, whisk in a BOWL....

joey

I grew up in rural southeast Georgia.....in Vidalia onion country.  I attended a rural county high school in what was considered a poverty county where my graduating class had 75 students and it was predominantly a farming community with no industry.  Until I heard it on tv, I never head "y'all" used as a singular pronoun, only as a plural.  Even here where I live in southside Virginia,  I don't hear "y'all" as a singular.  I never spent much time in the mountain south so can't speak for those areas, only rural southeastern Georgia where I lived for my first 24 years.
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by KYHeirloomer 

Prah leen, pray leen, no big deal. Where I was bread and buttered they just called it peanut brittle.

 

Now if I am saying the plural, "you all", yes it is "y'all". 

 

Putting aside Paula's (and the even more irritating Neelys') phony overuse, Allie, I don't know exactly where you were raised up. But in most of the South, "y'all" is, indeed, the singular form. The plural is "all y'all."  And, while you may not use them yourself (which suggests to me that you're city bred), to suggest that honey, sweetheart, and darlin' are not commonplaces in the South, particularly the mountain South, is just naive.

Quote:

Originally Posted by KYHeirloomer 

But that's just me 

 

And several millions of other folk, Highlander.

 

Unfortunately, many urban southerners think their native tongue is rustic and unsophisticated and are making an effort to do away with it. Personally, I don't understand anyone who looks down their nose at their own roots---linguistic or otherwise. But it's an observable fact that they do.

 

It's a shame, too, that the joint influences of television and tourism are quickly destroying regional dialects and idioms. Indeed, as little as 25 years ago, in places like the Outer Banks and the Georgia Sea Islands, you could still find people who spoke in pure Elizabetean form. Alas, no longer.

 

Soon enough we'll all be talking with the flat, uninflected tones of TV newscasters.

And to me that's a down right crying shame, I have noticed that my son's accent is nothing like my own and I have no problem with my heritage and anyone that thinks my accent sounds funny or "unsophisticated" can kiss my rump, I actually had a guy from Boston make fun of my accent one time ..... Are you frickin kidding me!!!!.

I'm sorry but to me the Boston accent is a very thick accent just as much if not more than the southern/appalachian accent.

And if I ever start talking like a newscaster I just hope and pray that someone just f**king shoots me in the head.

It's kinda funny but I had a roommate in the Army see me writing a letter one day and he actually told me that he was amazed at how well I was writing the letter ... apparently he thought that just because I speak with a southern/appalachian accent that I would write that way also, the same guy also met a friend of mine that I went to high school with and he looks at my friend and then looks at me and he's like "you two don't sound anything alike accent wise" or something along those lines, which just proves that you can live not even 20 miles away from someone and have very different accents ... it all depends on where your family is from and how much exposure you have had to the world.
 

All regional accents have their fans.  I have a very 'Jean Brodie' type of Scots accent, as opposed to Billy Connolly (who comes from Glasgow).  My view?  Bask in the 'differences'!

Since we're on the subject of regional accents, here's something that bothers me (but isn't food related). I don't like when people assume that since I'm from Louisiana, I talk like someone from "don da bah-o" ("down the bayou" - translation: South Louisiana). Or when you have a character in a movie from Louisiana or somewhere else in the deep South, and they are protrayed with a Charleston drawl. No one west of Georgia sounds like that. But I guess it's been romanticized by the movies.

And is "pecan" a native Indian word? 

'Pecan' does derive from an Algonquin word spelled in English as 'paccan' which is a word referring to a nut that needed to be cracked open with a stone.  The Algonquins were a large semi-nomadic North American tribe which occupied much of what is now Tennessee and North Carolina.  Born of this group were also tribes such as Blackfoot, Mahican, Delaware, Shawnee, Cree, Ojibwa, Wampanoag, Cheyenne, the Illinois Confederacy and several more.

Quote:

Originally Posted by gobblygook 

I've considered toying around with a "chef's special" which would be a dish not normally served, with ingredients purchased for that specific purpose.  An example would be a lamb dish, in a restaurant that doesn't normally serve lamb.  In such instances, it's not "oh crap, I have too much x and need to push it" but rather a true special dish for that day.

Now I, by contrast, would like to see the reverse. A couple of years ago a chef friend and I were drinking and talking (and drinking), and we decided it would be great if in your little local corner restaurant you had two blackboards, one labeled "today's specials" and the other "yesterday's leftovers." The latter board would have what usually appears on specials menus, at really drastically reduced prices: honesty in advertising. The former would be stuff the chef thought of this morning and which he or she cooks with his or her own hands. I've never seen anyone actually do it, of course.

A few years ago, a local Boston TV news crew put together one of those tedious ads they all do: watch us, we're local, we know what's going on, you trust us, blah blah blah. But these guys were actually funny. They spent weeks filming little snippets of themselves standing in front of signs with place names, pronouncing them. The thing is, we've got a lot of those same ones you've got in the UK, and some of our own: Worcester (wooster), Leominster (lehminster), Quincy (quinzee), Gloucester (gloster), Billerica (bil'rika)....

So the commercial goes, "Watch channel X news --- we're local!" And then quick shots of the reporters standing there in front of the signs, saying things like, "wor-ses-ter," "lee-oh-minster," "quin'see," "glao-ses-ter," "bill-EH-rika".... Great ad. If you're not from around here, you'd never know anything was odd about it, but if you are (and have half a brain) it's hysterical.

Oh -- a note on "fresh frozen." Presumably the other possibility is that they waited until it was getting a little dubious, then froze it. Yum-O!

Ummm.....
 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Highlander01 
And to me that's a down right crying shame, I have noticed that my son's accent is nothing like my own and I have no problem with my heritage and anyone that thinks my accent sounds funny or "unsophisticated" can kiss my rump, I actually had a guy from Boston make fun of my accent one time ..... Are you frickin kidding me!!!!.

I'm sorry but to me the Boston accent is a very thick accent just as much if not more than the southern/appalachian accent.

First of all, the so-called Boston accent isn't an accent, thick or otherwise. It's everyone else who has an accent -- we speak proper English.

Second, a case in point. My friend Sean, who's from Colorado, came to visit us here in Quincy, on the South Shore, just south of Boston. Very working-class neighborhood, with the real Boston accent, not that fake cr*p you heard on Cheers. We had to be out when he arrived, so we told him we'd leave the key with the neighbor --- well, long story, the point is that he asked my neighbor Steve about the keys, and Steve said, "Ahm, I think they praubably left it with Bahb." (Best I can do to transcribe the real thing.) Sean says, "okay, where does Bob live?" Steve looks at him like he's nuts and says, "No, not Baub, BAHB!" (Translation: not Bob, Barb!)

Every real Bostonian was ticked off when the T (the transportation system) decided to name the new little cards you use to get around (instead of cash) the "Charlie Card," after the stupid old song "Charlie on the MTA." We all wanted it to have a picture of a codfish and be called the "Cod." This was seriously proposed, and voted most popular, but the T people have no sense of humor and thought it was undignified or something. Idiots.

I am originally from  Brooklyn NY and I sound like it .To top that off I am proud of it.

Chris

'OUR' Billericay is pronounced 'Billeric AYYYY'!

As for the Bastan accent not being an accent but correct 'English'?   BWAAAAAAAA!

Ask anyone in the UK (according to the BBC) and the 'correctest' English is spoken in Inverness...!  (Where we all thought they spoke Auld Scots or Lallans!)

"Foodie." Don't know who thought it was a good idea to refer to connoisseurs, aficionados, or gourmands as some sort of cutesy diminutive. Given, the aforementioned terms sound unbelievably pretentious; all things considered, I like calling myself a food snob.

Chef BDL,

great thread !

This may not matter to anyone but when I hear it or read it, well it just drives me nuts : " New and Improved"....Why ? What was wrong with the "other " way ? And why is it when I taste it there is nothing different ?

It is a conspiracy !!!!!!!!!!!!!

               (  @ @  )

---ooOoo--(__)---ooOoo---

I love dog and cat food when it says '''New Improved Flavor Taste Better''''  WHO TASTE IT  ??? and who is the authority on it ?

I got a kick out of the commercials a while back that said something about McDonald's chicken nuggets being "Now made with 100% chicken". So what were they made from......scratch that. I don't want to know.

I have always thought that accents, (both domestic and otherwise) are the spice to the English (and American) language. I grew up in California...most of the family are in Texas and I'm married to a New Englander...I spent years in Europe...no getting away from regional accents...I just enjoy them as a "flavorings".

It's the self-proclaimed "foodies" that I don't get.  I don't mind the pretentious terms, but "foodie" sounds like "groupie".  To me, "foodie" sounds like a derogatory term you would call someone.  However, "food snob" (the way I use it) would seem to describe someone who THINKS he knows what he's talking about, but doesn't.  I think of the person who is trying to be something he's not.  The "judges" on Iron Chef America seem to be mostly "food snobs" (as I describe the phrase).   

 

Quote:

Originally Posted by Allium 

"Foodie." Don't know who thought it was a good idea to refer to connoisseurs, aficionados, or gourmands as some sort of cutesy diminutive. Given, the aforementioned terms sound unbelievably pretentious; all things considered, I like calling myself a food snob.

Calvin Trillin doesn't like "foodie" -- or foodies. He prefers to term himself a "food crazy." I like that.

I've always thought that "foodie" was kind of a wierd word. I've used it before, but I typically refer to myself as someone who "just likes good food".

As a matter of fact, "foodie" is a contraction---or is it maybe dimunitive?  Anyway, it stems from "food junky."  (Astounding the bits of trivia that stick in one's mind, ain't it.)

Personally, I prefer either of those terms to "food crazy" as a noun. Even "food freak" is more appealing to me as a self-description.

The "judges" on Iron Chef America seem to be mostly "food snobs" (as I describe the phrase).   

I suspect, Gobblygook, this reflects more on your unfamiliarity with the judges then with reality. Wasn't it you who thought Eric Ripart was a snob, because you didn't know who he was?

Let's see, off the top of my head, here are some of the people---regular judges all---who, according to your definition, are pretending to know more about food than they do:

Geoffrey Steingarten: Food editor for Vogue; book author; international food lecturer.

Donatella Arpia: Restaurant developer; chef; consultant; cookbook author.

Kareem Bartom (sp?): Public relations and marketing consultant specializing in culinary matters.

Andrew Knowlton: Food & restaurant critic for Bon Appetite.

I'm just a pizza boy but Foodie & Food Crazy seem to epitomize a mad burger jockey. This is where art meets engineering people.  *No offence to food crazies and foodies out there. (does anyone consider themselves a foodie?)

As Trillin uses the term, a food crazy is not a snob. A food crazy is the sort of person who likes to get into arguments with other food crazies about which place in Chicago's Pilsen district serves the best fish taco -- and to agree that an argument like this cannot be held properly without actually sampling the goods during the argument. Food crazies gather at local fried chicken shacks where it's known that on Thursdays Mamma Q oversees the cooking. Food crazies are the ones deeply depressed by the way mass-marketing of barbecue competitions has undermined local outdoor cooking traditions, and they console themselves by eating more barbecue. A food crazy is a white-collar professional in Louisiana who closes the office on days when the crawfish are just running across the road.

Most of these buzzwords and terms are used for marketing purposes, some bother me, some don't. The one that surfaced a few years ago that really bothers me is "superfoods". Does that mean they will taste super, or if I eat it them they will make me feel super? There is nothing super about broccoli or blueberries.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bazza 

Most of these buzzwords and terms are used for marketing purposes, some bother me, some don't. The one that surfaced a few years ago that really bothers me is "superfoods". Does that mean they will taste super, or if I eat it them they will make me feel super? There is nothing super about broccoli or blueberries.

I disagree...blueberries can leave a super stain. They also just taste great.