Liquor: Absinthe
Mixed drinks: Caiprinha or Mojito
Beer: Ale or Rauchbier or Czech lager
None of which are in the list! I'm a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an engima. Or it's a silly list.
There may be a lot of you who are judged to be esoteric.
Irish, straight up, if I'm not drinking beer or wine.
Re: OP.2, apparently a lot of people are dicks to their mums.
Since Rusty Nail isn't on there, I think I'm hot.
I cheated but my drinks aren't there
Mixed drinks: Mojito and Side Car
Punch: A recipe I tasted once that was made by Martha Washington
Wine: All kinds of reds--Syrah, a lot of spanish wines. White: Pino Grigio. Very dry sherry.
Beer: Hefeweisen
6: Me too, if Irish counts. If I drank Jameson's, I could get credit for knowing what I'm doing, but I favor Bushmills if they have it, which is unlisted.
Gin martini or bourbon neat, Sonoma County pinot noir, oaky chardonnay, rose of pinot noir, giant IPAs. None of which are in the list as I recall, except the pinot noir.
Beer: helles
Liquor: Bushmills, a couple of different Scottish single malts.
Wine: Zin.
Actually, if Bushmills 10 isn't available, I'll go with Jamesons. (This is the situation at the bar at the ski hill, and so it comes up pretty often in the winter.)
If I'm not having a Rusty Nail, I usually drink Jamesons. If I'm buying whiskey for home, I get Tulleymore Dew. Much cheaper (except at a bar) and tastes about the same.
5: Really? I would love it if my kids have that kind of teasing relationship as teenagers. I took it as loving.
Buying whisky neat at a bar always makes obvious how marked up the prices are, in a way that makes me cringe. Same thing for wine. (For some reason I don't have the same reaction to beer. Not sure why, although I guess just because it's cheaper--the markup may be as bad in percentage terms but it's less in absolute terms.) So I basically always order cocktails of some kind, which involve multiple ingredients, and skill some degree of skill to assemble them together. Even if there's a big markup on all of it, the making of the cocktail is a real value add. I certainly generally don't do it at home. Whereas what I do usually do at home is pour whiskey in a glass. I can do that pretty well. No need for me to pay someone else 1200% to do it for me.
Gin and tonic - so boring it didn't make the list.
IPA, negroni, aviation, spicy tequila cocktails, peaty Scotch, spendy bourbon, Pimm's, cabernet.
Maybe try more softball-y drinks? Old Milwaukee Light is pretty good if you get used to it.
Or Hamm's. If Hamm's still exists anywhere, it would be near you.
Jack Daniel's
Pinot Grigio
Sam Adams
My mom always gets mad at my dad if he orders a steak in a restaurant, for the same reason as 16. Or a variation, "That's the easiest thing for me to make at home! But you only want it on special occasions, when I'm not the one cooking!"
Aging a steak is an art that most people can't do at home.
I recently had a...a drink that had mint in it. And rum. And it didn't taste too much like rum, so I thought it was pretty good. It was really someone else's drink that they let me drink part of, but I would drink another one if I knew what it was.
If I have to have my own drink, pear cider is nice. Or a dry Spanish red. Or that drink from Brazil with the limes, but only if someone else makes it because it takes a lot of limes. Also they should clean up afterward because frankly cleaning up the lime debris and the mess in the pitcher the next day is a drag.
What bartenders think of me? That I am an enormous loser. I don't need to list any drinks to figure that out. On the other hand, I always overtip out of guilt because I know I won't be drinking anything very expensive.
So no love for the text messages? You all are strange to me.
So they list "whisky neat"; I like my bourbon (or Tennessee whisky if you are a trademark purist) on the rocks. If they mean real whisky, Lagavulin or Macallan, of course neat.
I listed Sam Adams, but should mention IPAs as well.
Aside from the occasional gin martini, I don't tend toward mixed drinks at all.
Separating Tennessee whisky from bourbon does not mean you're a trademark purist! They taste substantially different and they're made differently to boot.
25: my eyes are still weepy. #21 nearly did me in. (Reading it a second time I'd probably be stony-faced; it's the kind of thing that only works the first time. But yeah, I laugh at that shit.)
Rum rarely agrees with me but I had a dark and stormy (okay, two) this weekend and it was a fantastic cold hot toddy equivalent. Normally gin and tonic or if it's for pain relief bourbon and Coke, because I'm also cheap about getting wine with the level of markup you'll find in a bar. Rye if I feel like paying for something better.
Also: Old Fashioned; Martini (juniper heavy gin, 4:1 ratio, lemon peel twisted over drink but not left in, and two small/one large olive); or whiskey neat with a beer back.
28, 29: It was! I remember now! It was a mohito. I assume it's sort of a dorky drink because I've long since accepted than any alcohol I like just has no class, but it tasted very minty and leafy instead of having that really sweet boozy taste that you seem to get with a lot of rum drinks.
I really try to like classy drinks, but I just don't drink often enough to get a taste for them - all my friends are either in recovery or the type of people who are into gluten-free,wheat-free, soy-free living and aren't going to adulterate their precious bodily fluids with booze, or else they have too many jackass grad student dude friends and the only way to drink alcohol with them is to drink alongside the grad students, which means that we can only talk about their trips to Europe and how terrible it is that their host - my friend! the one providing the booze! - has taught herself French in her free time but does not have a good accent. So anyway, classy booze is out for me unless I drink alone, and I am reliably informed that this is the road to perdition.
You should try just going to bars and drinking with whoever is there.
No, mojitos aren't dorky at all. And probably gluten/wheat/dairy free as well.
This is a bartender at a place where it's too loud to talk, and the music is worse than my iphone shuffle. Possibly there are televisions with sports behind the bar until it's late enough to really get wild.
No way will either Natalie Merchant or Li Saumet be killing time here and just happen to notice my intriguing drink order. I'll have a greyhound with well vodka, partly because I'm cheap unless there's good reason to do otherwise, partly because if you're working in a dump like this, I won't be ordering anything that takes ingredients or skill to prepare.
38 to 35. Of course, you should only drink them outdoors in the summer near saltwater (or indoors if it's a hot day and you have the windows open). Other times and places, yeah, probably dorky.
I come from a world of teetotalers and find bars paralyzing, but I like cognac, so I usually pick the cognac that promises a complex aesthetic experience that will end in crying and adverse drug interactions. Is the link going to insult me in addition to that?
(actual drink I order most: prosecco/cava/similar bubbles, but at restaurants.)
I had an evening this summer that involved rum and diet coke plus Coors Light, both in copious quantities. Sometimes you drink whats on hand. It did not end well.
16. Beer from a keg is better than beer from a bottle-- no surfactants, for many imported beers much higher odds of having survived the boat trip intact.
The mojito is one of those drinks that I think people think isn't particularly classy despite actually having a long and super classy history. Most sweet rum drinks are questionable, but some of them are pretty impressively great. The mai tai is one of the world's best cocktails, or at least the original one is. Now pretty much any drink with rum, sugar and random fruit juices gets called a mai tai which ruins it a bit.
43 is assuming urple does not have a keg in his house.
43: that's true, and I thought about mentioning that, but it was all a bit of a sideshow from the main point of my comment, and anyway my point stands regardless, because I don't have the same cringing reaction to ordering beer in a bar even when I'm just ordering a bottle of beer, rather than something on tap.
44: I like mojitos better than mai tais.
There is an awesome small-plate restaurant (where we took urple for his going-away party during his tape worm phase) which makes amazing mojitoes. The bar tenders are all dressed up liek they are in old Havana.
Huh. Well, given that I drink mixed drinks perhaps twice a year (mimosas on New Year's Day and, inevitably, one occasion when someone wants me to have some of their drink) maybe I can time things such that it's mohitos in the future. It was really quite good.
47. All consumables out are primarily rent on the space and its ambiance. Thinking about ingredient cost is IMO a category error.
Humorless explanation isn't going to make me look any better to the ladies, is it?
I wonder what percentage of bars have mint on hand at all times? And simple syrup? I never order anything that might use them, so I don't know.
51: Mojitos arenot commonly available outside of summer.
Boulevardier, Last Word, Loire cab franc.
35. We've made mojitos a few times when we have surplus mint and they aren't bad. Frowner is exactly right about the lack of "sweet boozy taste," at least IMHO.
This particular mohito was available as recently as mid-November at a very noisy Japanese restaurant in the part of town that used to be trendy when my generation was the generation that provided all the hipsters.
Our local distillery makes a pretty good mule. What the deal, scientific folks, with the copper cup?
48. The chances that you're getting anything that actually resembles the original drink when you order a mai tai at a bar or restaurant are incredibly low these days. If there's any juice in it other than lime juice they're making up their own recipe - the original is just rum, lime, curacao, orgeat and sugar, mixed over crushed ice and garnished with mint. And the kind(s) of rum involved* are really important for the recipe to boot. (The original tiki drinks from the 40's and 50's are really finicky about the kinds of rum involved - as in, if a drink calls for gold Barbados rum any other kind of rum will make the drink taste mediocre at best.)
*In the mai tai the original rum involved is completely unavailable. Approximating it requires mixing different rums together, usually a dark jamaican rum and a dark(ish) rhum from Martinique.
The origin story I've read is that the bar had randomly acquired a supply of the copper cups, and had to invent a distinctive drink to make them necessary.
The copper cup is a purely historical thing. The story is that someone ended up with a lot of vodka and needed to market it, and he met someone who had just come into a warehouse full of copper cups so they decided to sell the two together (with the Moscow Mule recipe attached) as a gimmick.
Lillet isn't on the list either.
Can't vouch for the accuracy, but this is the story I remember:
One day, while Martin was visiting his friend Jack Morgan who owned the Cock 'n Bull pub on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, he bemoaned the fact that he couldn't sell his vodka. Morgan complained he couldn't sell his ginger beer, a side passion of his that saw cases of it sitting in his restaurant's basement. And a third person (never identified in any of the stories) lamented that she had copper mugs that she either didn't want or need. Enter the brainstorm. Could all three benefit from combining their losses? The vodka and ginger beer were mixed with a dash of limejuice and served in copper mugs, imprinted with a kicking mule. One day, while Martin was visiting his friend Jack Morgan who owned the Cock 'n Bull pub on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, he bemoaned the fact that he couldn't sell his vodka. Morgan complained he couldn't sell his ginger beer, a side passion of his that saw cases of it sitting in his restaurant's basement. And a third person (never identified in any of the stories) lamented that she had copper mugs that she either didn't want or need. Enter the brainstorm. Could all three benefit from combining their losses? The vodka and ginger beer were mixed with a dash of limejuice and served in copper mugs, imprinted with a kicking mule.
Posted by: LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 11-24-14 1:06 PM
I never heard of any of this stuff, but last night somebody did mention that a friend of his is going to start a local business making ginger beer.
53.1 and .2 I fully endorse, don't know what Last Word is. Also the wine thing is weird because it depends on what I am eating, but I do love Loire reds.
Scotch and soda isn't on there. Or "Pilsner in the summer, porter in the winter".
41: me too, which makes meetups extra weird. Not even teetollars, but no drinking in bars. I have a chef friend who makes me and my mother delicious mixed drinks and is amused by how tipsy we get. I suspect that shevlong since stopped putting g actual alcohol in them and is amused that we get tipsy by suggestion.
If someone messed with the autocorrect on my phone I'd be pissed. Not funny-haha pissed either. Leave my goddamn phone alone.
Yeah, I'm very defensive/protective about my phone. I'm not actually concealing any guilty secrets on it, but I feel as if I were. Don't mess with it, don't look at it, don't touch it.
Simple mixed drink: G&T
Fancy cocktail: Usually embarrassingly fruity ones
Liquor without mixer: Whisky
Beer: IPA (American style & extra hoppy)
Wine: Whites (Sauvignon Blancs, Reislings, Chenin Blancs, ok, I will stop naming varietals because I mostly like them all), Rose, and sparkling ones.
(Now I must click through & see what sort of person I am).
AIMHMHB, some woman asked to borrow my phone while I was walking down the sidewalk. She asked so abruptly that I said "No" without even pretending to be polite. She was offended.
rose of pinot noir
Oh man, I do adore those.
I'm surprised G&T isn't on there.
I have considered trying to second nearly all the comments in this thread, which I think just means I like alcohol, in all forms. (Or nearly. Still not a big tequila fan.)
"Pilsner in the summer, porter in the winter"
I'm mostly this, but lager season is short for me and I'm willing to substitute a medium-bodied ale for either. IPAs only when nothing else on the menu looks good and I want to have one drink last a long time.
And I like my single malts neat, but drinking whisky neat socially, given its cost, seems to mostly be signaling.
If I'm not eating?
Old Fashioned if I think it's a good bar. Manhattan or Negroni if it's a mediocre bar. Whiskey on the rocks or whatever seems least awful on the beer or wine selection if it's a shitty bar.
And I now see that the article is completely correct. I am hot, regardless of gender.
Mr Blandings and AWB are now high on my "people I'd like to drink with" list.
I pretty much want a margarita at all times. Doesn't mean it is always what I order in a bar, but it's not because I don't want one.
I am currently drinking Stagg, Jr. (with a touch of water) and enjoying immensely. Bourbon, yay.
79: See, sometimes there are reasons to be proud of being from here! I think that's the distillery where my friends are getting gay-married next year, even though I'm not sure what the odds are that it will be legal by then.
I'm usually iime juice and water, to keep up the reputation of hard partying engineers everywhere.
I do like a good Kahlua and coffee.
80: I'm going to have to make sure my husband never reads this thread & discovers how close you are, or you'll have an unwanted house guest. Their stuff is lovely.
Speaking of house guest, yesterday I was wondering about Franklin's saying, "Fish and visitors smell after three days." The man didn't have a refrigerator. How did he keep fish that long before they got smelly?
Cooked? Raw fish, I think you'd get one day, tops, but cooked fish in a fairly cool room, I could believe three days.
He kept them in the guest bedroom.
Also, it was the eighteenth century, and literally everything was covered in horseshit. His standards of smelling were higher than yours or mine.
Mojitos arenot commonly available outside of summer.
This definitely isn't true over here. Yes, it's archetypally a summer drink, but any bar that has a cocktail list (which is pretty much all establishments that self-identify as bars in the UK) will serve it year round.
Not true here, either, because we do faux-tropical-tex-mex 24/7/365/baby.
Most normal bars here don't have formal lists of the cocktails they make. You just ask the bartender.
86: I'm sure they were, but still I don't even eat cooked fish (not counting smoked or something) that have been in a refrigerator for three days.
What if you cook it for three days? Would you eat it then?
What if you've been drinking for three days, while cooking the flounder?
It's not like they didn't have cooling techniques back then - just ones that didn't work quite as efficiently as refrigerators do. The fish could have been stored in a crock or a spring house.
Also I wouldn't be surprised if you could keep a fish out of a fridge for a few days before it started to stink. I mean, I wouldn't necessarily want to buy a fish at the supermarket and then let it sit around on the counter for three days. It wouldn't be too palatable at that point even if it hadn't started to stink (stinking is different from spoiling - it takes at least a little more time). But buying a fish at the supermarket isn't exactly taking a fish out of the water either, and the lack of refrigerators makes it more likely that that's what he was thinking of.
Last Word cocktails are great if you're at a fancy cocktail place. Chartreuse is a fantastic ingredient I never have to hand -- I was going to make diamondbacks for a party since I had a bottle of Laird's apple brandy, but I kind of blanched at the price of the Chartreuse.
When I'm at fancy cocktail places, I often have rum drinks (Hemingway, Floriditas, corn 'n' oils if I can get them), but usually I stick to the less-likely-to-confuse old fashioned or just bourbon/rye.
Is Japan one of those places where passing gas is accepted as normal or one of those places where everybody pretends they never fart? Asking for a friend who went drinking last night with the usual effect on his digestion the next day and a co-worker from Japan who kept walking into his office at the wrong time.
Boulevardier, Last Word, Loire cab franc.
This is the perfect list. Especially if you add the Chartreuse Soleil. Perfecter.
Not the chartreuse soleil with orange juice, ick. The one that's half yellow chartreuse and half whiskey.
88: You can grow fresh mint more easily than we can in the winter.
Oh hey, I have an ethical dilemma. I have a wonderful violet liqueur that I'd like to use for Aviations but it's red, not purple. Is it permissible to use this or must I use Creme de Violette?
You may use the alternative liqueur, but you must refer to the resulting drink as a Red Baron.
Huh, I have Chartreuse in the cabinet for getting certain chocolate cakes tipsy, hadn't heard of Last Word it looks promising! And its lime season ...
106 is great.
You can put gin and lemon and a liqueur together with basically any liqueur (to varying degrees of success) and have it be a drink. Usually it's a pretty good drink too. There's no reason to stick to the recipe for an aviation (if you used a curacao-type liqueur the recipe would look basically the same, after all) unless you feel really really attached to drinking something called 'aviation'.
If the resulting drink is mostly (but not entirely) clear and also a bit pinkish but not completely red you could call it a John Rawls.
106: I think a Red Baron calls for grenadine, though.
||
Hawaii just told her piano teacher, "why does this song have angels on it? Angels don't have anything to do with Christmas." (They're practicing Christmas carols; she's looking at the illustration at the top of the page.)
|>
I wish Red Baron had not already been claimed, but I think John Rawls is the winner.
The teacher brightly chirped, "oh yes they do!" and kept right talking about the music.
I didn't know there was a drink called an Aviation. Does it taste of kerosene?
Mixed: G&T
Spirit: Ardbeg, neat
Beer: Deuchars
Wine: Cotes du Rhone
Cocktail: don't drink them; the secret of happiness is never drink a drink with more than one alcoholic ingredient.
97: You could always invite your co-worker to a he-gassen
(Actually you're supposed to hold it in until you can get to a toilet, like blowing your nose, which is also a no-no in polite company in Japan.)
Liquor: Whisky neat [Highland/Speyside malts rather than Islay, by preference]
Mixed Drink: G&T or Jamaican Mule
Wine: Red*
* Argentinian [or French] Malbecs, Spanish Garnacha, Chilean Carmenere, various Cab. Sauvignon, Italian Primitivo, etc -- in that sort of style, anyway.
Oh, and beer:
Czech lager, Deuchars IPA, or various dark ales if they aren't too sweet, or too hoppy.
a virgin mojito is a surprisingly satisfactory drink. it doesn't get you drunk, though. but it's yummy, and if you're going to be at a bar and not be drinking booze, you may as well have someone muddle mint for you. for making things like this or mint juleps or southsides at home I cannot recommend highly enough making simple syrup in which you let a few bags of peppermint tea brew the whole while it's cooling. it adds a solid mint base to your future endeavor.
119: What's in it--lime, mint, simple syrup and soda? Sort of like a mint lime rickey? Anything else added?
All I want is to watch Disney's The Lizard King.
I used to drink bourbon gimlets, but the lime has been so far reduced that it's really just bourbon on the rocks with a twist. If it's good bourbon, I skip the lime. If it's really good bourbon, I skip the rocks, or maybe use 1 cube.
I'm sure there's some heuristic for figuring out whether a bar will make old fashioneds that are good or that are punch-sweet, but I don't know what it is. I've had too-sweet ones even at self-important hipster bars, so it's not just "Do they sell a lot of shots, or do they make their own bitters?"
I think it depends on the age of the bartender.
122: I've had luck just asking: "Are your old fashioneds any good?" Most bartenders and wait staff are able to answer that question accurately. They may not say "no, they're terrible", but they probably will say "they're sweet", which is a diplomatic way of saying the same thing.
120 - Yes, except a rickey shouldn't have sugar in it.
Maybe the thing to ask with Old Fashioneds is whether they come in a small glass or a large one? The bad ones usually look to me like someone somewhere along the line has confused 'cocktail' and 'highball'. They should, after all, be reasonably sweet no matter how you make them - just not seven-up and maraschino cherries sweet.
I finally have something to say in this thread!
My wife loves Old Fashioneds, but has been disappointed by sweetness in their homeland, Wisconsin, too many times. My brother-in-law, a native of Sheboygan whose accent can be cut with a knife, a supper club maven, said that ordering one sour usually does the trick.
It means they'll use soda/seltzer instead of 7Up.
I guess a lot of people actually want them sweet.
Soda/seltzer? 7Up? What the hell are you people talking about.
It's the midwest. They'll also put something call "Squirt" in a drink if you say the wrong thing.
For the sake of foreign readers, i.e. those outside CST, I'm talking about a Brandy Old Fashioned. I've heard that in other parts of the earth a drink by that name is made with whiskey.
An Old Fashioned can be made with any spirit at all!
Literally it's first name was "cocktail" (which just used to be the name for one particular mixed drink). Then people started making other things and calling them cocktails as well (see: what happened to the Martini for a bit but I think it hasn't quite stuck). Then people who wanted what they used to be able to get by saying they wanted, e.g., a whiskey cocktail or a brandy cocktail or a gin cocktail* suddenly had to be more specific. So they'd go with an Old Fashioned Cocktail (for obvious reasons), and that's where the name comes from.
An Old Fashioned shouldn't really have any kind of soda in it, though. The oldest recipes call for a very tiny amount, by which I mean, the amount you'd need if you put a sugar cube in the bottom of the glass and wanted to quickly make a simple syrup before adding spirits (because sugar doesn't dissolve in cold whiskey well). If you happen to have simple syrup you don't add soda water at all (because you're adding pre-dissolved sugar). At some point a bunch of bartenders misread an old cocktail manual and assumed that they were supposed to be making a sugary highball, and there you go. But a proper one really just is: syrup, lemon peel (or whatever - but peel), spirit of some kind, and ice. (A cherry can be dumped in there for garnish but none of that stupid muddling crap.)
*Yes. Also it's really good. Seriously. But it's better up than on the rocks, unlike with darker spirits. Also gin toddies exist and are really incredible but good luck convincing someone to drink hot gin.
Gin toddies are fucking amazing and I am convinced. Maybe not to mix with Robitussin or while I'm at work, though.
see: what happened to the Martini for a bit but I think it hasn't quite stuck
It still seems pretty common. One recently-opened restaurant around here has a drink menu with separate sections for "cocktails" and for "martinis". The martinis cost $1 more than the cocktails and the only difference between the two categories seems to be the sort of glass they're served in. Not one of the items listed under "martinis" was a martini.
This one, to be precise. At least now one of their martinis contains gin. I don't think that was true when I was there.
It's still pretty common, yeah, but it hasn't made it to the point where everyone gives up and just refers to the martini by an entirely different name. And people do push back against it enough that I'm not convinced it's a done deal. So it's more at the "gimlets have lime juice in them" stage than the "punch is sugary fruit juice spiked with liquor" or "mai tais have grenadine/pineapple juice/whatever in them" one.
I associate printed drink menus with chain restaurants. Actual bars don't seem to do that and the fancy new restaurants seem to have it all on chalkboards or something.
Actual bars don't seem to do that
Sometimes I get the impression that Pittsburgh is a different country.
135: The hipster bar has a printed cocktail menu.
Do your local fancy restaurants also think that sandwiches all contain a layer of french fries?
138: If you ever find yourself at one of the burgh's two main universities (and hey, meetup), there's a somewhat fancy restaurant on a shopping street between them that has excellent (and gigantic) fry-topped salads.
Oh good lord that cocktail menu looks horrifying. It screams "we make money on spirits and we saw the menu at a bar/restaurant with an actual bartender and figured we could do that too." Also it lists a julip, a toddy, and sangria as cocktails which is really pushing it.
137: I thought it was all on that blackboard.
Maybe they don't offer me a menu because I'm too quick to order a beer or because I lack facial hair.
I don't go to places like in 133 unless somebody else suggests them. I don't mind them or anything. It's just way too much money to go out for a drink/snack at those kinds of places if you are going out very often.
We always drink at a table as we're antisocial and they have the menus there. The ones on the menu are not the same as the blackboard. I forget what they called it, but I got a variation on a Rusty Nail that had far too many kinds of Scotch yet somehow worked out.
You should try the facial hair. You could probably pull off hipster, or at least a kind of hipster, pretty well. (I on the other hand, should probably get rid of mine. But laziness.)
I tried facial hair. I can't get it to grow long enough to pass as a hipster.
Also, I can't pull off wearing working man's pants for casual wear. I've known too many people who wore Carhart for the traditional reason to ever wear them ironically.
143: We got drunk at the hipster bar a few weeks ago. Wallet-wise, just about the worst thing we could do. Definitely sticking to a one-drink maximum.
145: Pics or it didn't happen.
I'm fairly certain that the better the facial hair is the less hipster it is. If all you can get is a patchy/straggly/not very long beard then you're right in the sweet spot for hipster facial hair.
139: I'm pretty sure I have eaten at that restaurant, but no one told me I should try the salad.
149: Huh, my stereotype is that luxurious beards with oil or whatever in them are most hipster. But hipster contains multitudes. Mine is patchy and straggly and is getting enough split ends that I really need to trim it back, but it looks (in my opinion) much more slacker than hipster.
I have always been under the strong impression that dalriata was female, but--I don't want this to sound sexist or offensive, it's really not meant to be, so please don't take it the wrong way--151 is causing me to question that impression.
(No, 144.2 didn't cause me to question that impression.)
You can tell because he hasn't killed anybody and the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Yeah, the "a" is a bit misleading, but on the other hand if you think of a person who'd name themselves after a medieval state, you'd probably think of a male. And I've said a lot of stuff that is clearly rank with male privilege.
I'm really bad at gendering unfoggetarians. In the lack of specific knowledge or pronounced masculinity, I tend to assume, correctly or not, that people here are female.
So are you saying that you are actually not a woman?
I am actually, to the best of my knowledge, not a woman. There's a picture of me on the flickr feed (where my account is associated with my real name) that correlates with this.
All these months I was thinking Dalriata, what an interesting female pseudonym. Probably from some fantasy novel.
155.last: female Muppets, right? Comity.
When I'm in bars that have any focus on mixed drinks, I'm used to there being a small menu with their house specialties.
153.1: Maybe you mixed up dalriata and delagar? I have a bad habit of only looking at the first letter and approximate length of a pseud, so it takes me a while to learn to distinguish cases like that.
I can't keep any of the Daves separate or, absent context, tell lk from lk.
158: It does have that vibe and admittedly I've used it for female toons in MMOs, etc. There's a long tradition of using Scottish place names inappropriately in fantasy settings, as to an American ear they might not quite sound familiar but they've usually been Anglicized enough to be pronounceable and not particularly ethnically marked. I should have chosen a more gender neutral name on that theme like, uh, Elmet or Alt Clut.
161: That's a good point. Would it help if I capitalized the D? I'd hate that she get confused with the stupid stuff I talk about. Trademark dilution and all that.
There's a picture of me on the flickr feed (where my account is associated with my real name) that correlates with this.
You really should stop posting dick pics.
The lks, in some respects the most protocol-compliant couple, are most confusing in that the male partner has a female-coded first name.
164: the dick pics will continue until morale improves.
165: I've read their names as being modifier-noun combos, so I just remember that the kayak is male while the keyaki, whatever that is, is by process of elimination female.
I once walked into Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap and for some reason thought it reasonable to order a Brandy Alexander. The punchline is that the guy made it for me.
Anyway, late to the thread but I guess my standard order at a bar is
beer: goes through phases, right now whatever pilsener they have
liquor: Dewar's and soda if it looks like the kind of place you don't want to ask them to mix anything.
cocktail bar cocktail: whatever has seven ingredients none of which is vodka and "Lady" in the name.
Bitters and tonic if I don't feel like drinking.
once walked into Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap
Never ordered or drank anything but beer there, but many, many gallons of it.
Oh and if I'm doing the mixing my standard these days is a 20th Century which makes me feel awfully la-di-da but really it is the best cocktail.
Cocktail: don't drink them; the secret of happiness is never drink a drink with more than one alcoholic ingredient.
Ajay is dead to me.
I once mixed champagne and Jack Daniels.
Oh here is my alienate-everyone comment! I skipped wine because generally I do not give a fuck about wine. Good champagne, sure, but I've been told on here what I consider good champagne is swill, so I revert to "I do not give a fuck about wine."
I'm drinking Christian Brother's Cream Sherry. Not now (I'm on a conference call), but of an evening.
Until Moby posted 173 I was assuming he used that mixture to unclog a drain.
I like Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc. Beyond that I have no palate for wine. I'd love to hear how that makes me an unrefined pleb.
174: I think the canonical answer is "More for me," right? Ditto ajay's take on cocktails. Plus it can inspire you to hate-create a Lady Ajay.
I do not give a fuck about wine
I also do not give a fuck about wine!
What do I give a fuck about? Probably could think of something if I thought about it for a while.
People on the call are angry, but probably not at me. Too early to tell.
165: I know, I needed a homophone for lurid, was thinking geography and completely forgot about Madonna's kid. (And any illustrious namesakes of the past.) But to which protocol do we comply?
The absence of my cocktail of choice, gin martini, from that list surprised me. I mean, maybe they're less common bar fare these days and I don't order them unless I trust the bar, but surely the connotations are vivid?
We have some easy-drinking Bulleit rye in the office and now that the company is going out of business, phone calls not involving it are anomalous.
I'll bet Our Lady of Lourdes would be a lousy cocktail.
The aspergillum is a great garnish, though.
Except for gewürtztraminer/riesling* with Asian food, 177.1 is mostly all the white wine we drink.
*usually the former
The issue resolved itself such that I can fuck off over the whole of Thanksgiving break. Hooray.
Mmmm, Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc... No judging from me.
I really like Marlborough Sauvignon Blancs, as well. Though we drink a pretty wide variety of whites, really - generally whatever the wine shop across the street recommends, as by now they know our tastes extremely well. (This is dangerous.)
I'm not very good at being snobby about drinks, especially wine. I figure if you like it, then why not drink it? (However, I am vaguely embarrassed that in one pub I always order Pinot Grigio. It feels like a stereotypical girl drink, or something.)
(I also like Old-Fashioneds with soda. But I always knew I was midwestern at heart.)
Both of the currently active threads are really making me want a drink.
Me also. Plus the angry guy on the conference call.
The call is over, but I'm still wound up.
192: I ended my day with a less than stellar conference call as well.
Reading 182 made me want some Bulleit rye, so I bought some, and now I'm drinking it.
I'm not on a conference call, though.
I also recently bought some Bulleit rye, as well as several lambics, a brandy from california, and a brandy from Armagnac.
This may not end up being the most erudite episode of the show.
Now I am drinking one of the lambics into which I have poured the remains of my previous bottle of Bulleit while snacking on gribenes, because apparently I want to become drunk fast enough not to notice my imminent heart attack.
Bulleit rye is probably my favorite rye, admittedly in large part because I'm like the bottle itself.
I actually initially started drinking Bulleit on Stanley's recommendation, and he mentioned the shape of the bottle then too.
I'm like the bottle itself.
Er, I *like* the bottle itself.
I bought maraschino because I was tired of saying "well I can't make you an aviation because we don't have maraschino, but I could make you a blue moon." It's like when I order a decaf and the barista looks all confusey-face and says "well, I could make you a decaf americano..."
It turns out an aviation tastes enough like a blue moon that I'm having some buyer's remorse.
Hi teo! I haven't been showing up for the show much.
You can use maraschino in other things too!
Hi Smearcase! That's okay. It's not like anyone watches it.
194: Hurrah, in that case posting 182 was the most productive thing I did at work today.
208: You have the gratitude of both myself and Diageo.
The bourbon thing sounds good. I expected maraschino to be more cloying than it is. I also feel like I'm being pretentious when I say its name aloud because maraskino and all but you can't unknow things. ALCOHOL/PHONETICS HUMBLEBRAG.
If it helps, I've been known to unthinkingly ask for "a biscotto" at coffee shops and promptly feel like a total tool. BISCOTTO TOOLBRAG
211: I feel that way when I say "sowna" for sauna, but once I internalized the pronunciation, I couldn't rescue myself.
213: my grandfather always referred to skiing as "shee-ing", because that is of course the correct Norwegian pronunciation, and he had learned to ski from Norwegians in Norway in 1945. I don't think it was a deliberate affectation; I think that was just how it was pronounced when he first came across the term, and it stuck with him.
174: I think the canonical answer is "More for me," right? Ditto ajay's take on cocktails. Plus it can inspire you to hate-create a Lady Ajay.
Worst Weird Science remake ever.
If it helps, I've been known to unthinkingly ask for "a biscotto" at coffee shops and promptly feel like a total tool. BISCOTTO TOOLBRAG
Handy tip, which also works for panini: ask for "one of those biscotti".
178: the Hate Cocktail is certainly a concept that could do with development.
Plus it can inspire you to hate-create a Lady Ajay.
Played by Elsa Lanchester.
My only image of Elsa Lanchester up until ten seconds ago was her in a shocking wig as the Bride of Frankenstein, but then I looked her up on Wikipedia and saw the pic they chose for the article and, hmm, this may be an artiste whose oeuvre will reward further close study.
I had an argument with a barman in a bar in Glasgow once, over the correct pronunciation of a Czech beer.
Me: 'I'd like a pint of Krušovice, please'
Hime [snooty voice]: 'It's pronounced Kro-soh-vitz."
Me: 'Er, no, no it's not."
Him [angry voice]: "It's Kro-soh-vitz."
Me: "I speak Czech,* do you?"
He got surprisingly annoyed about it.
* a lie, but fuck it, I was just back from a month in Prague at the time, and my Czech pronunciation, if not my vocab, was pretty decent.
Probably a Pan-German irredentist barman. "In the great days of the Habsburg Empire, it was Krosowitz, and to me it will always be Krosowitz, damn it!"
Where do folks fall in their actual pronunciation of the 'g' for gyro? The Greek guy at the first place I learned to love them (a '70s pickup bar in the shadows of the dying tire factories) wouldn't make one for you if you didn't ask for it with the Greek pronunciation so a lame attempt at that is what I tend to use. Just last week I had a discussion with a cook at our company cafe who subscribed to an abbreviated version of the following summary from Quora:
Greek pronunciation: "Gyear-ose, with the 'g' kind of aspirated." The Greek word "gyros" is singular, not plural. "Gyro" as an American back-formation.
"Official" American pronunciation: Like the prefix in "gyroscope"
In practice: "Americans trying to pronounce it in the Greek manner sound just as stupid as when they overpronounce French names for food in restaurants."
220: start with the Yashmack song.
I expected maraschino to be more cloying than it is. I also feel like I'm being pretentious when I say its name aloud because maraskino and all but you can't unknow things. ALCOHOL/PHONETICS HUMBLEBRAG.
Marilyn Monroe pronounces it "Maraskino" in Some Like It Hot, so that's mainstream enough to justify doing it.
223: I say "Yer-ro" because I don't care.
I drink very little* and on alcohol, I know from shit. For wine I tend to drink Merlot or Shiraz, and something in the neighborhood of a Märzen for beer if I can sort out what that might be from what is available. Hard liquor I only drink at meetups and rely on JRoth's guidance. Everything else I dismiss as mannered silliness, which although not a defensible position is certainly informationally efficient**.
*As a young adult semi-regularly practiced broad undiscerning abusive consumption which led me to have an involuntary shudder anytime I got a strong whiff of hard liquor for the next several decades.
**For instance:
Over the years, Merlot has been known under many synonyms across the globe including: Alicante, Alicante noir, Bégney, Bidal, Bidalhe, Bigney, Bigney rouge, Bini, Bini Ruzh, Bioney, Black Alicante, Bordeleza belcha, Crabutet, Crabutet noir, Crabutet noir merlau, Hebigney, Higney, Higney rouge, Langon, Lecchumskij, Médoc noir, Merlau, Merlaut, Merlaut noir, Merle, Merle Petite, Merleau, Merlô, Merlot noir, Merlot black, Merlot blauer, Merlot crni, Merlot nero, Merlott, Merlou, Odzalesi,Odzhaleshi, Odzhaleshi Legkhumskii, Petit Merle, Picard, Pikard, Plan medre, Planet Medok, Plant du Médoc, Plant Médoc, Saint-Macaire, Same de la Canan, Same dou Flaube, Sème de la Canau, Sème Dou Flube, Semilhon rouge, Semilhoum rouge, Semilhoun rouge, Sémillon rouge, Sud des Graves, Vidal, Vini Ticinesi, Vitrai and Vitraille.
I don't like Merlot much, but I want to drink Crabutet noir merlau.
223: we call them kebabs, or donner kebabs (Turk: dóner kebap) because when we were picking which Mediterranean ethnic group was going to have the honour of serving us with half-cooked lumps of sweaty mystery meat at two in the morning, we picked a different one from the one you picked. Also a gyro (or rather a Giro) was your benefit cheque. And I appreciate that Americans probably wouldn't go for a foodstuff called a Donner kebab.
,i>because when we were picking which Mediterranean ethnic group was going to have the honour of serving us with half-cooked lumps of sweaty mystery meat at two in the morning,
Right. Bars closed at 2 in my fair dying Midwestern industrial city, but the place in question kept its kitchen open until 4 and did a healthy business. IIRC it was called the "Dubyl Tyme"-- something like that.
221 sounds like he was saying красавец, which means "handsome man." He LIKED you!
230: A love of Japanese fart scrolls is close to universal.
231 - #NOTALLAMERICANS
233. His pronounciation does sound like that. That's the literal meaning in Czech also. In practice it's the word you might say derisively if prince or a different purple dwarf dipped in pubic hair wearing assless chaps walked into the room.
230: Sorry. You just can't take me anywhere.
Off-topic: I like this map in the NYTimes showing which recipes people Google on Thanksgiving, by state. Maybe apo can explain what a "pig pickin cake" is.
A bartender once corrected my pronunciation of "saison", telling me that it was pronounced "session".
215: Delord Napoléon. The local stuff is black rock wineworks' brandy.
re: 236
Yeah, but the correct pronunciation is more like 'KROOSHehvits-eh', no? S with hacek, emphasis on first syllable, short/vestigial vowel on the end.
240 by way of asking for confirmation, not by way of telling 'lw' how to say it, of course.
Sémillon rouge
I can add colors to the Sémillon!
239: An employee of a hipster smoke shop once corrected my pronunciation of "Gauloises" -- "No, no -- say, "Gall-wah!" No, no yourself, lady!
I will bow to no one with regards to funny mispronunciations--a (suburban) kid in my dorm freshman year thought it was "burg-ee-OH-see."
242. Yes, absolutely. The bartender is an idiot. Possibly a prat for pompously correcting to the wrong pronounciation-- is prat the right British word?
Krasavec is a funny different word.
Oh, for whatever its worth, not a lager I'm too crazy about. Plzen, Budvar, Kozel, Bazant still OK-- lots of the other small breweries seem to have either been bought up and lowered quality, or independently decided to lower quality. Krusovice is the most widely available non-Plzen CZ beer it seems.
I have no idea how to say "Gauloises".
re: 246.last
My wife's Dad buys 'Svijany', which I really like. It's a bit more perfumed or aromatic.
http://www.pivovarsvijany.cz/index.php
I prefer Krusovice to some of the other standard pub choices, though it's not my favourite. I'm not a big fan of Pilsner Urquell, though. Wife's Dad always offers it to me as the 'premium' beer, while he drinks something cheaper. But usually I prefer the cheaper option.
But Galwah is one of my favorite mathematicians. Such a firecracker.
I say "yeero"
Worked with a guy from the Balkans a few years ago who was amazed Chicagoans said that. In Florida, where he'd been before it was pronounced Jie-ro.
Although the word in the famous Yeats poem, Gyre, is usually pronounced "Jire"
And the falcon of the far north, the Gyrfalcon, is pronounced Gear-falcon in English.
247: Same as in 244, but with a "z" sound at the end. The pretentious smoke shop employee would have been right (or close enough) if there were no "e" in "Gauloises".
Although the word in the famous Yeats poem, Gyre, is usually pronounced "Jire"
Or indeed in the famous Carroll poem. It's as in "gyrate", and unlike brillig, chortle, galumph, gimble, wabe, etc, Carroll didn't make it up.
251: closer to "goal-wazz" than "gall-wazz", I think.
I realized when lecturing a week or two ago that I have no idea what the right pronunciation of "Rydberg" is.
"And the falcon of the far north, the Gyrfalcon, is pronounced Gear-falcon in English."
Jer-falcon, I think, given it's from French. Wiktionary says dʒəːfɔːlkən.
251: closer to "goal-wazz" than "gall-wazz", I think.
A goal wazz, of course, being what Emile Heskey used to do when playing for England.
254: Right, that's why I said close enough. The vowel sound will vary with accent; the consonant at the end won't.
I thought when Heskey played it was mostly goal!-Wha?
Salad Niçoise presents the same problem.
231 223: we call them kebabs, or donner kebabs (Turk: dóner kebap)
I'm used to seeing the spelling "döner kebab" in or near Germany, so I sort of assumed the first vowel was an o with umlaut, but maybe that doesn't accurately reflect the Turkish version of the word?
I had never encountered gyros before starting college in Chicago, so they've always been "yeeros" or maybe "jeeros" to me. I was surprised to learn later that there are places where they're pronounced as in "gyroscope."
223: I ordered them as "gyro"-scopes until corrected, which has stuck. So I'm "year-o" usually, but sometimes fight myself back to gyro per the scope.
Recently a little shawarma shop opened up about a block away from my apartment, and it gets rave reviews on Yelp, but I tried it once and was underwhelmed. AISIMHB the Wikipedia entries for "shawarma," "gyro," "souvlaki," and so on have (or at least used to have) really entertaining talk pages where people of various ethnicities trashed each other for stealing the cuisine that is rightfully theirs, or tried to draw excessively subtle distinctions to clarify why their version of meat-in-a-pita is the best.
There was a farmer had a wrap, and
Year-o was his name-o.
Jer-falcon, I think, given it's from French. Wiktionary says dʒəːfɔːlkən
Makes more sense than what I've heard. Probably the guy I heard had never heard it pronounced, which is common among American academics, who use words in print all the time no one has ever pronounced in their presence.
Now a true gear Falcon was the cheapest rental car in my youth. Three-on-the-tree.
which is common among American academics, who use words in print all the time no one has ever pronounced in their presence.
I remember one math class where a student asked the professor a question about "sheams" and it took a while for someone to figure out he meant "schemes." You would think in that case the fact that it's a common English word would have clued him in to the pronunciation.
Bulleit rye is truly magnificent, but also kind of hilarious since Bulleit has almost nothing to do with the whiskey itself (they put their name on it and that's about it). The rye itself is the standard mixing rye sold by Midwest Grain Products (in Indiana). They distill and age a lot of basic spirits like that so that companies who want to release a bourbon with a smallish amount of rye in the mash bill don't need to distill their own rye (which is a fussy grain to distill). Bulleit just had the idea that, hey, why not just put that stuff in a bottle directly and sell it!
It's a pretty good seller too (because it's awesome), which means that a couple other people had a similar idea not too much later. So actually you can buy the same basic stuff across a variety of proofs and ages, which makes for a really interesting set of comparisons. (For example, you can see what the difference between 90 and 80 proof is in a whiskey, or the difference between 7 years and 5 years in the barrel, and so on.) Going back way, way up in the thread, you can also tell the difference between Bourbon and Jack Daniels because one of the people releasing that rye (at the same aging as Bulleit I think) is George Dickel, which makes Tennessee whiskey (so they do the filtering process to it that makes Tennessee whiskey different from bourbons).
Oh - and double checking the name sent me to a page where (I just realized) they also have the names for some of those additional rye whiskeys. If you're drinking Bulleit you're also drinking the same basic whiskey as: Templeton, Filibuster, High West, James E. Pepper, Redemption, Smooth Ambler, and (with a little tweak) George Dickel.
I've mentioned before that as a kid [up to about 11?], I thought there were two words:
Kay-oss [I wasn't sure how it was spelled, but which I heard people use in speech.]
and
Chaos [which, in my head, I pronounced 'tcha-ohss'].
And if you'd asked me to define each of those words, I'd have given similar definitions. And yet, somehow, I didn't make the connection that they were the same word for ages.
And the same here (also mentioned before) for dehbree (spoken) and debris (written).
I'm used to seeing the spelling "döner kebab" in or near Germany, so I sort of assumed the first vowel was an o with umlaut, but maybe that doesn't accurately reflect the Turkish version of the word?
It does - I just got the keystrokes wrong for an ö. It is written "döner kebap" in Turkish, with ö representing more or less the same sound as it does in German (though I would welcome confirmation from someone who speaks either Turkish or German on this point). Döner means rotating; there's a tomb called the döner kumbet (rotating tomb) in Kayseri, which doesn't rotate, and never has.
I was The Literature Guy on nerdbowl team which meant I knew who had written the ten most famous novels in the universe, only I had taken German and not French, so I once buzzed in to inform everyone that the author of Madame Bovary was FLOUburt and was mocked by a smarter person.
I was recently heartsick to learn that gneiss is pronounced "nice" rather than "g-NISS" with an initial glottal stop.
I've been reading b pym and a hilariously opinionated book on the fall of the roman empire by an archaeologist (taken as an - extremely effective btw - antidote to carrère), so of course the drink of the moment is gin and French. Pretty good, actually!
Rydberg has two thoroughly Swedish vowels in his name, for which I don't know the IPA
umm. something like ʏ and ɛ: ?
The unhopped approximation would be something like Rudebear. The final G is the almost silent ghost of an English "y"
Also, as a child I was convinced that the opposite of "Guilty" was "innockosent"
Yeah, but the correct pronunciation is more like 'KROOSHehvits-eh', no? S with hacek, emphasis on first syllable, short/vestigial vowel on the end.
Yes, absolutely.
Hooooray! I actually say this correctly, thanks to a lot of hard work on the part of a Czech bar manager. (Unlike the way I pronounce pretty much everything else, including the languages I've actually studied. Maybe I just need to learn while drunk.)
I really like gyros & schwarma. I have never, however, had a doner kebab. Are they really pretty much the same thing? This might either reveal something weird about my social circle or myself, but I don't know anyone who goes to kebab shops unless really drunk, so I got the impression they were gross. While I'm sure gyros are fine drunk food, I actually like them sober, a lot. Perhaps it's just the kebab shops around here not being very good.
This might either reveal something weird about my social circle or myself, but I don't know anyone who goes to kebab shops unless really drunk, so I got the impression they were gross.
Some are, some aren't. Definitely drunk food though, because usually the kebab shops are the only thing open at 3am.
I had the "words ignorantly and consistently mispronounced" conversation with coworkers recently, inspired by someone (a classicist!) pronouncing "eppy-tome".
Open question we had: how is "antipodes" pronounced? For "antipode" Google gives /ˈan(t)əˌpōd/ for "antipode" but for "antipodes" /anˈtipədēz/; that singular doesn't seem like it should have that plural.
You have to say it like WC Fields.
I was recently heartsick to learn that gneiss is pronounced "nice" rather than "g-NISS" with an initial glottal stop.
Indeed. Gneiss is the bedrock upon which all Geological pun sessions are built.
I've heard that Chief Justice Rehnquist pronounced it doe-BEAR, but never heard him say it. Then I met the lawyer who represented the guy, and he said it was DOW-burt.
Zis would be Deebear and dogbear, from the bande dessinée, non?
I am sitting in a departure lounge at Midway watching the Powder Puff Girls, as one does.
284: I don't think you can take that for granite.
287: That's Powerpuff Girls, Mister! Pow!
Daley still has his name the recycling bins.
"By the power vested in me by the great and wonderful Daley I hereby dub this recycling bin 'Wry Cooter'."
287. There's a gold coast dogs in the food court, go to the window from there and you can get a beer from the counter window at the bar, beer and a hotdog watching the planes taxi by is 100% +++ would snack again.
I'm with a small child so we ate pizza without anybody getting their drunk on.
A few minutes after takeoff you'll be passing over my kids and their friends, coming home packed into a subcompact. Fingers crossed.
Cued up Louis Armstrong's great 1931 recording of Stardust, the uptempo version although many prefer a different version from the same year. Certainly didn't have the heart for St. Louis Blues
Keep masturbating to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
BOGF worked in a Greek-run gyro/pizza place as a teen. The owner so despaired of American pronunciation of gyro that he preferred the -scope version to any failed efforts at being more accurate.
Me, I can't respect a people who don't understand that "beta" doesn't start with the letter V.
Me, I can't respect a people who don't understand that "beta" doesn't start with the letter V.
On the other hand, though, "βετα" doesn't start with the letter "b", so what's the issue?
Keep masturbating to Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Every time a rat dings, an angel gets its wings.
Me, I can't respect a people who don't understand that "beta" doesn't start with the letter V.
Russians?
"βετα" doesn't start with the letter "b"
Nor does βήτα! Vita software, vita blockers, vita particles: modern Greece, it's more than austerity and gyros.
Thread inspired me to walk across the snowy, windy bridge today to a may favorite greasy spoon Greek joint to get a gyro and fried. Also for exercise ...
All of which led to a short unintentional nap at work this afternoon.
Also, as a child I was convinced that the opposite of "Guilty" was "innockosent"
Silly English k-NIGITS.
Which reference reminds me of what first came to mind about the drink questions upthread, that it would be like facing the guardian of the Bridge of Death. "And WHAT is your favorite WINE?" "Brunello...no wait, Chateauneuf-du-AAAAAAAAaaaaaah"
Reflection on the Rockford Files: Forcing someone to drive you somewhere at gunpoint is less awkward with bench seats.
305: awkward turtle hates bucket seats
My dad is complaining about how long it takes to read a chapter of Piketty. I'm wondering if I should point him to the summary I used.
Late to this and nobody cares but:
223: The Greek word "gyros" is singular, not plural. "Gyro" as an American back-formation.
Yes but it's also the Greek accusative, so when you ask for a gyros in Greek, you say "gyro", which maybe complicates matters and makes me wonder whether it's really a back formation? You're almost always going to hear "gyro" rather than "gyros" in actual speech, including (I think) that of Greek-American gyros vendors, so it doesn't seem unlikely to me that it would be picked up that way (though of course people probably do think that gyro is the singular of gyros, but maybe more in the way of a folk etymology than a back formation).
308: I care! I didn't know modern Greek had lost the ν in the masculine accusative singular and would have guessed it was γύρον.
Using (trying to figure out) the "American" pronunciation of words of foreign origin is one of the most infuriating of life's stupid little social protocols. In California, land of Spanish placenames, I constantly fuck it up. My aunt told me about her ongoing dilemma with cabbies in the Loop, where using the correct pronunciation always met with "oh, you mean GO-thie street!" -- but then, when she tried that, she'd get a withering "I suppose you mean Goethe." (I like to imagine the second cab waiting outside the symphony, ditching his fares if they say anything against Webern.) I don't really know French, but I also don't really know how to ingenuously mangle the names of breakfasts at La Note MMMM LA NOTE and I've never met anyone who said "djai-ro" for gyro. I have also never ordered a gyro.
Open question we had: how is "antipodes" pronounced? For "antipode" Google gives /ˈan(t)əˌpōd/ for "antipode" but for "antipodes" /anˈtipədēz/; that singular doesn't seem like it should have that plural.
It looks like for "antipodes" we've collectively decided these days to pronounce it semi-Greekishly, but we didn't in the past, and the singular reflects that past. The OED lists "antipodes" as the main entry and only mentions the singular in the etymology section: "Formerly (quite regularly) three syllables, an-ti-pod(e)s, and hence having a singular antipod, antipode (compare apod, apode, decapod), still in use in certain senses; compare French antipode, -s."
The still-in-use sense where the singular is still in use seems to be the transferred meaning of "the exact opposite of a person or thing", I guess after the French.
Of course the "singular" is itself a back-formation; "antipodes" in Greek is plural but the singular was "antipos".
311: informative, thank you! I, and the only person I talked to who knew of the word, both pronounced the plural in the regular three syllable way and were surprised to learn that people from the place that's on the far side of the world from the places on the far side of the world pronounce it otherwise. Good to have the OED confirm that. It still isn't clear to me whether educated Americans say it the British way or not, but presumably, as our antipodes are just a bunch of water and Kerguelen.
as our antipodes are just a bunch of water and Kerguelen
Don;t forget the CNN plane.
"Antipodean" is quite common - or at least not rare - in the UK to mean "Australian and New Zealander". and I've never heard anyone say "antipoads". It's always "antipodeez".
"Antipodean" is quite common - or at least not rare - in the UK to mean "Australian and New Zealander".
And South African.
In case the Unfoggedariat is not familiar, there's a corridor in west London along the Uxbridge Road which is seemingly entirely populated by such "Antipodeans".
Thinking about antipodes often leads me to ruminate on how east-west and north-south are such different constructs. For instance, when you move northwest your antipode moves southwest.
Having a globe demarcated with reference to a North, South, East and West Pole would lead to very confusing results. A lat/long would no longer be an unambiguous descriptor.
These difficulties could be avoided by using a system of six poles: North, South, East, West, Shwest and Schneast.
320: Yes, there are a number of reasons why the current lat-long system makes sense due to the rotation of the earth--and the East/West poles would be arbitrary--but I don't see how lat/long would become ambiguous.
I also always thought of it as four syllables but I barely use or hear the word so the three-version could still be lurking.
I've basically only read it so I assumed regularity until I heard it on the BBC. English orthography is so full of lovely surprises.
I really do think I've heard WC Fields say it.
I also always thought of it as four syllables but I barely use or hear the word so the three-version could still be lurking.
We're still talking about "y'all", right?
The three-versions support me in email.