Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her to a restaurant that serves sushi, the traditional Japanese food of white rice and vinegar, either rolled (maki) or in little balls (sushi) or, for the real connoisseurs, just the raw fish (sashimi). But you, my peer in education and taste, already know that.
As we looked at the menu, I could see her face freeze up. Ah, I know what's happening here--she (a woman) who has only graduated from high school (but I won't say why or what she's done after that) is uncomfortable with the idea of eating raw fish, as she probably hasn't had the opportunity to travel or speak with people outside her culture, even though I, just the mushroom part of the penis, am also outside her culture.
I know this is horribly wrong, but I wondered if David Brooks had already found a younger and less educated mistress.
I wonder if he's trying to avoid saying that she's his undocumented Mexican housekeeper.
And that she froze at the price tag more than the exotic meat names.
1: This is generating some fine parody on twitter as well. I giggled out loud at the one from Simon Maloy, though there are many other good ones.
I'm assuming someone here has already covered his other recent gem.
It's clear we're living in a golden age of bailing. All across America people are deciding on Monday that it would be really fantastic to go grab a drink with X on Thursday. But then when Thursday actually rolls around they realize it would actually be more fantastic to go home, flop on the bed and watch Carpool Karaoke videos. So they send the bailing text or email: "So sorry! I'm gonna have to flake on drinks tonight. Overwhelmed. My grandmother just got bubonic plague...."
True story: When I moved here with a graduate degree, my no-college in-laws had to tell me what "capicollo" was. Turns out, it's ham. Or salami. I forget.
Does anybody remember when Harvard-educated Matthew Yglesias mocked a server at a restaurant for not knowing how to pronounce "bruschetta" and he was all wrong?
At the time it seemed like it was all just good fun, but in retrospect that marked the end of faith in American meritocracy.
6: At first I thought that read "golden age of balling". We wish!
7: I assume you told them that you stick with Oscar Mayer bologna. Like a real American.
My capicollo has a first name. It's h-a-m. My capicollo might have a different first name, of s-a-l-a-m-i. I can never keep my capicollo's first name straight and if you ask me why I'll say, "Because I never when to college and learned to spell B-A."
8: Welp, it turns out that I didn't know how to pronounce bruschetta. I liked my pronunciation better, though.
I pity the fool that doesn't know what B.A. stands for!
I've looked up the pronunciation of bruschetta before, and I'd feel like a pretentious ass saying it the right way, honestly. Actually from now on I'll feel self-conscious no matter how I say it, so I might as well say it right.
I can't do that weird Italian thing with the 'ch' you need to do to pronounce it right.
That's what they say they're doing, but there is clearly more.
Mortadella is easy to remember. That's a type of ham invented by Morton Allen Della, a man well known for his love of pork fat.
Okay, 45 minutes later, I still can't stop laughing over
just the mushroom part of the penis
I'm so regular that I never use the k sound at all. "Chids! We're having chichen for dinner! Grab your forch and chnife," I say.
20/22: I'm reminded of the skit where Ali G. goes to the UN and has to first explain to the audience what a bellend is.
For a moment I was questioning the value of my college degree because I'd never encountered the phrase "striata baguette" (as opposed to "striata bread" or just "striata") before. But it turns out Brooks seems to have just made that up, which is perfect.
Mentioned here: http://www.donrockwell.com/index.php?/topic/217-dinner-the-polyphonic-food-blog/&do=findComment&comment=165792
ogged: Objectively pro-David Brooks.
Of course, the guy peep quotes cites wrote a book called "The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy."
So it seems likely that Brooks bought something labeled "striata baguette" at the grocery store and thought that this was the correct name rather than a grocery store labeling software issue?
I mean, I sympathize - I grew up in the eighties in a suburb and my family, though never hungry, was not wealthy. It was not until I was about twenty that I ever had tofu, avocado, enchiladas, palak paneer (or indeed any Indian food), sushi and lots of other things that are widely consumed now. In fact, I'm sure I never had anything labeled "striata" until I was 22 or 23, because I know where I could have bought such a thing and I'm sure I didn't go there until after college. Seriously, it seems possible to me that I never ate a burrito until after college.
So anyway. Even we who attended nationally ranked SLACs can be food barbarians, but you'd think that anyone with any romance language background would know that "striata" and "baguette" are, at the very least, not the same language.
Wish I had a striata right now, but my health has meant that bread has become a sometimes food. Oh well, at least there's always tofu.
We had lots of enchiladas when I was growing up, but no sushi, Indian food, tofu, or Chinese food. I was in college before I tried sweet and sour shrimp even.
I'm 100% sure I didn't have sushi until after college, and probably not much Mexican or Indian food either. Certainly I didn't know specific names of dishes except what could be gleaned from a commercial.
I agree with everyone who is saying that the real issue here is that David Brooks is apparently an insensitive and classist "friend." I feel sorry for the lunch date, if she exists.
In other news, our federal government is calling on men's rights advocates to weigh in on campus sexual assault policy. That's definitely going to end well.
26: Interesting! Was going to say that a single reference hardly establishes that Brooks didn't make it up, but that link is talking about the bread at a small DC chain (Marvelous Market) that folded a few years back, so maybe that's what they called it and where Brooks got the phrase. I offer Mr. Brooks my sincere apologies. But if this purported incident took place at Marvelous Market it''s even stupider than it already sounds--I can't imagine anyone feeling like they needed a college degree to order something there, it was a little fussy but hardly panic-inducing exotic.
My dad once tried to get us kids to eat escargot. We traveled a great deal and ate in various restaurants. It just never occurred to my parents until about 1990 that food from any part of Asia was something good.
I also think the point of this thread is Brooks. And never more infuriating than when botching a worthwhile point.
There is a lot class signaling, usually heedless; I don't read anyone here as denying it.
Damn, now I'm fixating on Marvelous Market brownies--by far the best brownies I've ever had. Back in the early 2000's, before I was fat, there was a MM on my walk home from work and all too often dinner was their jambon buerre (on baguette, but not--so far as I recall--"striata baguette") and a brownie. I bet Brooks' unsophisticated friend would have really enjoyed one of their brownies if he hadn't rushed her out of the place like that. And now she'll never have that opportunity.
I've never heard of 'striata'. Looking it up, it seems to be an American thing?
So many other inappropriate things Brooks could have been doing that prompted a reaction he read in the most self-centered way possible.
"Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into my enema appointment afterwards to ask her questions about the meal."
https://mobile.twitter.com/gilbertjasono/status/884756918048358400
I am the last to see this but I laughed too
I looked up "striata bread" on Google and it told me I was thinking about ciabatta. I had to really insist before it relented and told me it's a sort of American bread.
From the description, I don't think you can have a striata baguette. A baguette is a specific type of bread (as defined by the Law of 1905), it's not just a specific shape of bread. If, in a moment of forgivable abstraction, I had accidentally made a wholemeal loaf that was three feet long and four inches across, that would not be a baguette; that would just be a long thin wholemeal loaf.
On the general point, I have never quite understood all the Sturm und Drang over "not knowing what things are on a menu". Just ask. It's happened to me lots of times and every time the waiter just explains what the thing is. That's his job. Or order something at random and prepare yourself for an interesting discovery. And on the other side I've never found myself (qua dining companion, or qua waiter) tempted to sneer at someone because they don't know what a foccacia is or how to pronounce pho.
I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into my enema appointment afterwards
Keep your friends close, but your enemas closer.
Weird. Kevin Drum doesn't get whet's so dumb about the Brooks column. http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/07/501010/
If I were to criticize Brooks's column, it would be only on grounds of chestnutitude. This is city-mouse-country-mouse stuff, and it's not only been a feature of every society ever in human history, it's been the theme of widely-read tales for at least several millennia. Like, um, "The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse," allegedly composed by Aesop around 600 BCE.¹ The problem it describes is neither especially American nor especially 21st century.
Still, there's nothing wrong with pointing it out again. I'm not sure there's much we can do about these kinds of informal barriers, but it's surely worthwhile to at least acknowledge them every once in a while.
Drum apparently missed that Brooks is claiming that the feeling of being out of place or alienated in an unfamiliar social setting is an important new barrier to social mobility -- more important than structural issues like college admissions or exclusionary zoning. It's funny, he's not usually that dim.
Just ask.
And, as needed, follow-up with, "But it's 100% dead when it comes to the table, right?"
One of my favorites is "How spicy would you say that is, keeping in mind you're being asked by a man raised in Nebraska?"
The underlying assumption behind everything like Brooks' column, and this sort of thing has been going on for decades, is that the White Working Class/Middle America/the Salt of The Earth/whatever you want to call Trump voters feel understandably injured by the existence of cultural markers they're unfamiliar with, and that this injury is something the coastal elite/liberals is doing to them and should stop. Hostile snobbery, where it exists, is a bad thing that should stop. Selling Italian lunchmeat isn't hostile snobbery.
People selling Italian lunch meat or the increasing concentration of wealth, income and political power in the hands of the few. Pick one. The poors can't handle both.
The Koch brothers demand you eat bologna for America.
I guess, technically, bologna might be Italian.
On the east coast, does Italian really read upper class? If so, how do you explain "the jersey shore"?
49
It's spelled baloney, you effete unAmerican.
re: 51
I don't think that's the point, though. Knowledge of lots of different cuisines, codes as middle or upper middle class. Even if the people who originated those cuisines may not.
53
I'm being tongue and cheek, except also there used to be lots of working class Italian delis where knowing Italian terms for lunch meat wouldn't signal upper class at all, much in the same way Mexican food apparently doesn't to David brooks and his supposed friend. That's not entirely gone from the east coast.
In the US Italian culture entered from the top and the bottom at different time periods , so to say, so on the one side you get Prada and on the other the Jersey Shore.
The underlying assumption behind everything like Brooks' column, and this sort of thing has been going on for decades, is that the White Working Class/Middle America/the Salt of The Earth/whatever you want to call Trump voters feel understandably injured by the existence of cultural markers they're unfamiliar with, and that this injury is something the coastal elite/liberals is doing to them and should stop
Whereas Trump voters and their purported mouthpieces in the punditry would never dream of using unfamiliar culinary cultural markers to bash coastal elites, those arugula eating, Swiss on cheesesteak ordering liberals.
Except, at least around here, there are so many Italian Americans that those lunch meats are basically working and middle class. I don't think New York City is much different, at least in terms of the percentage of white people who have Italian ancestors. The whole thing would have seemed only marginally more ridiculous if his friend were afraid of lasagna.
I'm being tongue and cheek
Now that's a proper working class sandwich.
Even in the rural areas around here, all the stores have capicollo and the like. WASPS weren't going to dig that coal and the Irish were starting to get violent in their insistence on being paid.
51 Fuck no. And in Brooklyn of all places? Double fuck no.
I speak as a paisan with fairly deep Brooklyn roots.
I think that's part of what Brooks and similar are smuggling in. The offense that Trump voters are injured by isn't only elitism, it's cultural difference of any kind. A working class Jersey Italian deli hurts Brooks' imaginary friend by existing, because if she's unfamiliar with it, it's proof that she and her family and friends aren't the only real people in the world.
on the one side you get Prada and on the other the Jersey Shore.
Having those held up as opposite ends of a scale is somewhat startling to me, but then ISTR someone here last year noting that "small towns in America don't have haute couture, you know, like Burberry".
61 sounds plausible. It's neophobia - you know, like rats have. Introducing the idea that there might be some food out there that you haven't tried before but that you might like is pretty much a microaggression to them.
62: And on checking back, that was Buttercup too, so now it looks like I have a deliberate programme of mocking her opinions on fashion, which I don't.
And I think she really is mostly imaginary. I don't think even a lot of Trump voters perceive that sort of cultural difference as a primary offense. But I do think right wing elites have put a lot of effort into whipping that up as a grievance -- "The fact that people exist who are culturally different from you means they're riddled with contempt for you," and it's worked pretty well.
Prada in the streets, Jersey Shore between the sheets.
The opposite would be preferable because fake tan tends to rub off on bed linen. Or so I hear.
61 Now it's really too bad the Carnegie deli closed, we could have gotten a column about how alien and alienating knishes, corned beef, and matzoh ball soup are
Brooks can go fuck himself.
68: I know it's tempting, but at Scottish levels of pale, you should probably just reconcile to your natural skin tone.
70 I hope the kasha varnishkes give him apoplexy.
66: But, even by those standards, Brooks is fucknets. The guidos eating capicollo is who voted for Trump. At least I think they did. I haven't asked many.
The "working-class white man" in my head is at least part Italian. All the contractor's trucks and things like that have Italian names.
61
But that makes the Mexican food bit perplexing, right? Presumably the white-bread-eating-Italian-food-hating Trump voter isn't going to be ok with Mexican food. And if the woman is his Mexican maid, as a native Spanish speaker she's probably not going to be totally intimidated by pronouncing Italian words or Italian food. It's possible she was offended by the Yuppie prices on food she sees as pretty pedestrian.
Another possibility is she's actually Italian, and she's offended by the existence of sandwiches called "Padrino" or "striata baguettes."
65
Most people at least wait to see what I wear before mocking my fashion sense.
We had lots of enchiladas when I was growing up, but no sushi, Indian food, tofu, or Chinese food.
Pronounced: "We had lots of enkiladas when I was growing up, but no susi, Indian food, tofu, or Kinese food."
This thread reminds me of Donald Westlake's Irish police chief called Mologna.
75: Mexican food may not be seen as offensively foreign? I mean, curry isn't regarded as suspicious foreign muck over in the UK. You wouldn't be seen as some sort of elitist know-it-all for knowing what aloo gobi is or how to pronounce "murgh" or what goes into a peshwari naan. Quite the reverse.
I know, analogy ban.
Mexican food isn't seen as foreign at all as far as I can tell. This doesn't seem dependent on social class or level of expressed racism.
78: there you go then. I notice that, while about half of British ration packs include some sort of curry, about half of US MREs are some sort of Mexican food. You can eat beef and black bean tacos three times a day if you aren't careful. Hence my curry analogy.
I hate black beans. You can usually get decent beans, like pinto, at most Mexican places.
I wonder how much cheese is in actually Mexican food. I suspect much, much less than in what gets called "Mexican" food in most of the U.S. I also wonder why we added so much cheese to Mexican food, but nobody has tried grating cheddar over pad thai or something.
but nobody has tried grating cheddar over pad thai or something
What's the Rule 34 analogue for recipes?
I'm sure somebody has done everything with food. I was wondering if anybody tried to take it to a mass market.
Also, that looks just awful.
Grating cheese over a dish of noodles in a spicy sauce isn't exactly unheard of.
81: I think there's a fair amount of queso fresco in things here and there, and American Mexican food substituted cheddar, but it's a pretty big alteration.
84: Cincinnati chili is great.
85: I was just thinking that neither the Aztecs nor the Maya were known for their cows.
WWC have their own stupid cultural signifies. I swear, the amount of camouflage I see people wearing in southwestern NH seems to have doubled since this time last year.
Well, of course. That comes up all the time in this sort of attack on 'coastal elites' -- that not only do they have their own cultural signifiers, they don't have the WWC signifiers and if they try to adopt them they're shameful contemptuous fakers.
Re 73, I am down the shore with the boyfriend's family right now and can confirm that they did and they are vocally unrepentant.
Pelt them with lunch meat. It's the only solution.
All of this is a reminder that it's really hard to know what to do when a significant chunk of your country are just fucking wankers.
There's always been a significant chunk of the country that's just fucking wankers. The problem is that now the wankery isn't randomly distributed (or even at all distributed, politically). The Republicans weaponized wankery.
Yeah, I guess that's what I meant. Not common or garden every day pricks, but ones who act like a collective, or who are unified by particular strains of idiocy.
Pelt them with lunch meat. It's the only solution.
Ripley seems to have lost her edge slightly.
OT: Did you know Chinese people send email messages with a sig file reading "From my Huawei phone"?
I'm wondering if that's Chinese for "Apple"? I guess I could look it up.
Vaguely on the topic of the original David Brooks column, Sausagely has a good post on vox that clarified something for me: that both the UMC/professional/urban vs. lower-mid-class divide and the 99 percent vs. 1 (or .1 or .001) percent divide are significant and matter, but the latter divide matters more in federal politics.
81: I live in a 95% Latino (mostly Mexican) neighborhood in L.A., and the local discount supermarket has a lot of Mexican cheeses that I've never heard of, so I think cheese is pretty important in "Mexican" cuisine, though probably different cheese than what you get in Tex-Mex food (which is what most "Mexican" places in America serve). One suspects there are large regional variations within Mexico, anyway---the extent of my experience with this is that Yucatan food, at least, is quite different from what Americans think of as "Mexican" food.
When I spent a week in Mexico City, gorging myself on tacos at every opportunity, there sure wasn't very much cheese involved. I suspect they only kept cheese options on the menu for when the occasional gringo stumbled through.
There isn't cheese in tacos in any of the L.A. taco trucks I've frequented either. One suspects it's used more in other dishes.
@44
That's the premise of most of Vance's book also, isn't it?
Has anyone done a J.D. / Jack Vance crossover?
This thread has reminded me, in mid June I walked out of my department building and BAM, there was a giant screen of David Brooks's face, giving a commencement speech. On the other side of the quad, there was an actual David Brooks on a stage talking into a microphone. I have to say, there really should have been a trigger warning on the door.
Wasn't the screen image a kind of trigger warning before exposure to the real thing?
Did you pelt him with lunch meat? I'm thinking this could be a general purpose tactic.
Let me tell you about a thing we have in the Land of Freedom called "Costco".
There were no practical hints to interrupt the magic current of phrases, unless a kind of note at the foot of the last page, scrawled evidently much later, in an unsteady hand, may be regarded as the exposition of a method. It was very simple, and at the end of that moving appeal to every altruistic sentiment it blazed at you, luminous and terrifying, like a flash of lightning in a serene sky: "Pelt them all with lunch meat!"
93/95. You need reminding of this? The wankers act like they're a collective because of the rules of collective responsibility. They're the fucking government.
I'm from the government and I'm here to help.
105: omfg I'm giving back my degree. Dictators, whatever. David fucking Brooks? Sure, I can do college over again.
You could go here. We have very, very cheap housing. Or just cheap, if you want to live somewhere convenient.
116: Moby is offering you a cot in his living room.
I mean: it's 2017, Trump is president, and David Brooks is your commencement speaker. Was there a mass suicide? (But honestly, under the circumstances I think I would have been happy enough not to graduate into a recession to keep the dagger sheathed for a year or so. How long are we giving the functional economy these days? Can they keep it afloat until 2021?)
The German word Kot means something disgusting enough that I'm a little squeamish about the English false cognate as well, tbh.
For what it's worth, WC Italian-American for capicola is "gabagool".
121: I did not know that and can't tell if you're serious.
It's totally serious. It's not a dialect I can do myself, but NY/NJ Italian is largely immigration for Sicily and far southern Italy, and the pronunciation that stuck for a lot of food words comes from that dialect and is pretty far off the spelling.
Stereotypical Italian-American accents make a lot more sense when you know they're based on southern Italian dialects, which do things like drop the final vowel.
104: I am Lurleen the Unavoidable.
|| This is making the rounds in the MT twittersphere: http://www.rollcall.com/video/video/watch_heated_exchange_between_tester_and_indian_health_services_witness |>
The idea that prada and the jersey shore sit on opposite ends of some kind of taste continuum is ... not accurate imo. Prada not gucci or d&g, sure, but hardly loro piano or max Mara. prada's enduring value in my mind is its assumption of boobs + waist. so tedious the endless stream of clothing that fits in one area but not the other.
and yes Mexico loves its cheeses, they are multitudinous, regional variation glorious, and not widely found in US v sadly. also proper cream, mmmmm ....
121, 125 Those are my peeps. It is indeed 'gabagool'.
I love that the word comedians use to make fun of New Jersey wasn't invented by comedians to make fun of New Jersey.
I know this is all seriously terrifying, but it keeps on cracking me up.
The Jordan Rice reply in that thread is great.
115
At least you have the satisfaction of knowing that your student life fee is not in some small indirect way paying for his commencement speech fee.
Trying to remember who spoke at mine; Edward Shils, I think.
For my daughter, we didn't even go to the main event. Diploma awarding is dispersed now.
Haven't been in Rockefeller in years.
My commencement speaker was the day before actual graduation so I didn't go. (Looking up: MLK III.)
MLK II was the best of the trilogy.
I saw Tom Wolfe give a commencement speech (not my graduation). The speech was on topic for the thread because it was all about how the kids were now all elite. It really pissed-off the non-college graduates I was attending the ceremony with, despite the fact that I have seen them eat capicollo.
The part of MLK II where MLK says "I am your father" wasn't much of a surprise, but at least George Lucas didn't direct.
On the general point, I have never quite understood all the Sturm und Drang over "not knowing what things are on a menu". Just ask. It's happened to me lots of times and every time the waiter just explains what the thing is. That's his job. Or order something at random and prepare yourself for an interesting discovery. And on the other side I've never found myself (qua dining companion, or qua waiter) tempted to sneer at someone because they don't know what a foccacia is or how to pronounce pho.
ajay, IIRC you're a white guy. In my experience, the power dynamic of a white guy (or an UMC white woman, like me) doing this is verrrrrrry different than it is for people with less social power. I've been mildly sneered at by waiters for not knowing stuff, but extremely occasionally. Most people respond in a friendly way, not just because it's their job but because in most situations in the US, I have equivalent or greater social power to them.
But just because it doesn't usually happen to me doesn't mean that it doesn't happen to others. For example, on an embarrassing number of occasions, I've been among [other UMC white] people who have ridiculed or otherwise put down someone else for not knowing a supposedly-common food or etiquette item.
That kind of obnoxiousness isn't just social preening. It has real consequences -- as in the case of job interviews that occur over lunch as a "test."
This story is a pretty vivid example, although not from the restaurant world:
I sat in on an interview for a new administrative assistant once. My regional vice president was doing the hiring. A long line of mostly black and brown women applied because we were a cosmetology school. Trade schools at the margins of skilled labor in a gendered field are necessarily classed and raced. I found one candidate particularly charming. She was trying to get out of a salon because 10 hours on her feet cutting hair would average out to an hourly rate below minimum wage. A desk job with 40 set hours and medical benefits represented mobility for her. When she left my VP turned to me and said, "did you see that tank top she had on under her blouse?! OMG, you wear a silk shell, not a tank top!" Both of the women were black.
The VP had constructed her job as senior management. She drove a brand new BMW because she, "should treat herself" and liked to tell us that ours was an image business. A girl wearing a cotton tank top as a shell was incompatible with BMW-driving VPs in the image business.
Also, I keep waiting for someone to point out that David Brooks is probably wrong on the food he actually ate. DC is full of Salvadorans, not Mexicans.* There are certainly Mexican-style taco places, so perhaps he went to one of those, but it would entertaining if he actually had pupusas or something.
(*There are Mexicans in Maryland, but if Wikipedia is right, Brooks lives in NW DC).
You sure aren't supposed to poop in the finger bowl.
What did people do in five-hour airport waits before free wifi?
Also, I forgot to say that last night at dinner a (otherwise quite nice-seeming) woman quoted this exact Brooks column with great approval and appreciation.
I was momentarily boggled by the appearance of an actual fan in the wild. She also loves Ezra Klein "although he's a little bit leftist."
I think of that silk shell story once or twice a month. (Also, I sent my mom some link with a picture of a San Francisco office, woman posing in front of desk, handbag on floor, and she replied that no woman of color she had worked with would ever, ever put their handbag on the floor. Just not done.)
(The woman pictured was white.)
Just not done.
Any particular reason for that?
I got a sneering correction of the pronunciation of cappuccino at the food service counter on a ferry in Scotland. I think technically we were both wrong.
Brooks being Brooks, the story probably took place in Milan during a stopover on the way to Lake Como.
" on an embarrassing number of occasions, I've been among [other UMC white] people who have ridiculed or otherwise put down someone else for not knowing a supposedly-common food or etiquette item."
Fair enough. Though, as I say, this has never happened to me, either wearing my UMC white privilege hat or my waiter's apron of servitude.
Clothing is different. I have heard men being unpleasant about other men's clothing quite a bit.
Doesn't the general prohibition against punching down cover all this stuff?
Imagine a waiter sneering at a mispronunciation - forever.
153
Well, there's the problem. The woman was probably Sicilian and didn't want to be mocked for saying 'gabagool' instead of capricollo. Though, beats me why you'd want to eat Mexican food in Milan.
158 is a joke and all, but it makes a good point. American class snobbery is just nothing compared to northern Italians versus southern Italians. They've been refining it since Rome fell.
We've had this discussion dozens of times of course. Non-English words that are naturalised into English are pronounced like English if you're speaking English. The English for Bruschetta is Broo-shetta, cappuccino is capa-cheeno, etc. Just like the English for Madrid is Madrid, and you don't have to do that soft "d" thing as you would in Castillian.
157: I can't even imagine that happening except in a Mitchell and Webb sketch.
It's Brooks, so the simplest gloss is that he simply made it all up. I'm astonished we've got to 161 comments without anyone pointing out that fabricators gonna fabricate.
158. There seem to be a load of places, but none of them look very tempting.
163
I wonder what European country has the best Mexican food. My Mexistani* former roommate lived in Spain for a bit and said definitely not Spain. My husband says maybe France/Paris? He's had Mexican food in Northern Italy and Prague, and says neither are all that great.
*Mexican-Pakistani
Damn sure it's not Britain. I've never found a good one. Also, Mexican immigration is very low and most "Mexican" places are run either by the children of Pakistani immigrants or the children of Chilean refugees from 9/11 (73).
The best one I've ever found was a hole in the wall at the top of The Mound in Edinburgh, which was OK, but that was 10 years ago and I'd be astonished if it was still going.
Never mess with a Sicilian when there is ham on the line.
I had an excellent Mexican meal in Dubrovnik one time.
We found one decent Mexican place in Córdoba run by Mexican expats but otherwise its true that Mexican in Spain sucks.
They took the silver and left the mole.
There is a new taco place by me. It is replacing a Belgian waffle place.
Which replaced a cupcake place. I guess life is slowly becoming more Atkins-y.
The cupcakes were great. I never had the waffles. Using a plastic fork to eat syrup and sugar dumped on carbs out of a paper bowl just doesn't even seem pleasant.
The cupcakes might have been hard for David Brooks to explain to his guest. One of them involved stout.
172 syrup and sugar dumped on carbs
What, no bacon? Anyway, you should bring your own real cutlery to a "place" like that. (A paper bowl for a waffle? Jesus wept.)
Damn sure it's not Britain. I've never found a good one. Also, Mexican immigration is very low and most "Mexican" places are run either by the children of Pakistani immigrants or the children of Chilean refugees from 9/11 (73).
London has improved a lot on this in the last couple of years, especially if you're after tacos. But, until then it was probably the most notable cuisine dearth going.
Both North Carolina and Nebraska have good, cheap Mexican restaurants where you could get enchiladas, rice, and refried beans for about $10, including hot chips and salsa as a starter. Pittsburgh has none of that, as far as I can tell. It irks me.
Using a plastic fork to eat syrup and sugar dumped on carbs out of a paper bowl just doesn't even seem pleasant.
Do you also hate funnel cakes? That seems unAmerican.
I'm not a fan of funnel cakes. I was when younger, but they thought makes me queasy now.
I either made a typo or met a sentient funnel cake.
Funnel cakes are really good, but I guess county fair deep-fryer technology has moved beyond that now. Deep fried Snickers bars are where its at.
True story. My usual bar hasn't had a deep fryer for some several months now. Something to do with the fire code. It's harder to drink too much without french fries.
Damn you, I want Snickers now.
You can eat them raw, if you the problem is you lack a deep fryer.
The English for Bruschetta is Broo-shetta, cappuccino is capa-cheeno, etc.
But English has allowed the ch spelling in loanwords to more often retain something close to its original phonetic value than other spellings, though. In most native English words it'd be /tʃ/, but it could be /k/ (Greek; clearly some Italian), /ʃ/ (French), or /x/ (Scots and the Gaelic languages, Yiddish, Hebrew). Heck, the fact that you're trying to pronounce it as /ʃ/ is an internalization of the German pronunciation of sch.
The inconsistency is annoying and the memorization required does serve as a social signifier; I had a waiter get snooty with me when I tried to order some tʃimay.
To be fair the the Germans, I say "schmuck" way more often than I say "bruschetta".
To be fair to the Italians, they're much better at coffee than the whole rest of Europe.
Like all the best words, the schmuck you say is a Yiddish loan; Wiktionary says that in German schmuck is an old-fashioned adjective that means "pretty" or "spruce" (as in "spruced up").
re: 184.last
I had an argument once with a barman in a bar in Glasgow, when I ordered some Krušovice. I pronounced it the Czech way,** not to be pretentious, but because that was always how I'd heard it pronounced.* I wasn't at all bothered that he pronounced it differently. I was bothered when he angrily tried to correct my pronunciation.
* and I was literally just back from 3 weeks in Prague.
** https://forvo.com/word/cs/kru%C5%A1ovice/
Too bad you didn't have Marshall McLuhan with you.
187: If the Germans weren't so horrible, the Yiddish influence on American vocabulary wouldn't have been so great.
Can I suggest you take David Brooks on a pub crawl in Glasgow? And maybe "lose" him at some point.
187: There are a lot of competing arguments for the etymology of "schmuck" in Yiddish, but if it's from German I suspect it's the noun meaning which has a separate Wiktionary entry.
Not to depreciate "putz", but the opening "schm" is really what makes the word pop.
188: My experience is that Anglophones, without a good reason otherwise, are generally more awful with West/South Slavic pronunciation than they are with other nearby languages. I assume because those ethnicities were more often at the edge then the center of empires.
192: Good point. It didn't occur to me that Wiktionary's policy of being case-sensitive means that German nouns get separate articles. That's unfortunate.
It has no connection to the German word for jewelry, as in family jewels? That's disappointing, I'm always so excited to make dick jokes when I see jewelry stores in German speaking countries.
195: It probably but not necessarily does; I was wrong. The other etymology suggested is from the Polish for dragon, which is also quite good.
I don't understand what accuracy has to do with puns. Widely shared bullshit works just fine.
I always assumed it was the jewellery one, after all it's perfectly possible to call a stupid person a gem:-)
The inability of halfway-decent Mexican food to cross the Atlantic has always amazed me. Part of it is that you can't get masa so you'd have to make your own but surely it can't be that hard.
I read somewhere that before commercially available masa, half of the waking hours of women in Mexico was spent making tortillas.
199. You can get masa harina in any of the major British supermarkets. I don't see why that wouldn't apply to other countries.
I want to dye some green and call it Masa Verde.
In California we realized our kids didn't know what a burrito was.
They obviously sell them around here, but its nonstandard enough that it's never the go-to item for kids.
Good start to a Stephen King story.
You're an ordinary blue-collar white guy (of course you are, you're a Stephen King protagonist). You're down at the ATM withdrawin' some money and instead of five $20s coming out of the slot, a little bit of paper appears. Written on it in a weak, shaking hand is the message "HELP I AM TRAPPED INSIDE THIS ATM".
What happens next?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/13/texas-man-atm-bank-of-america-escape
Write back, "Give me $1,000 first".
That's disappointing - he was just stuck in the room that backed onto the ATMs.
Speaking about money this is really good: https://tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2017/07/06/what-modern-monetary-theory-can-teach-us-about-criminal-justice/
Can I suggest you take David Brooks on a pub crawl in Glasgow? And maybe "lose" him at some point.
This is the best idea yet.
I want to dye some green and call it Masa Verde.
If you weren't off Twitter, you would have seen the ruthless mocking going around of the "gentrified elote" (rainbow-colored!).
OT: We are having the best, best rainstorm right now. Absolutely perfect summer storm. I love July.
I put my phone outside to record it. So beautiful.
I had to stay off Twitter for mental bandwidth preservation. It was unfogged, TJ Hooker fanfiction, or twitter. Pick any two.
I like the site in 188.
Some of the words on the English list surprised me.
https://forvo.com/languages-pronunciations/en/
Yeah, forvo.com is a great site when you want to know how to pronounce something like, say, "Taoiseach." What irritates me are when you get people who are clearly not native speakers/ from the region in question offering their pronunciations which are as frequently wrong as they are American.
Without wanting to start that thread up again, 14 North American entries for "crayon".
Oh, hey, guess what: grandparents have a bona fide relationship with their grandparents. Who could have guessed?
216: And yet none of them are correct. "Crown," obviously.
To quote directly: Indeed, grandparents are the epitome of close family members.
Trump should really be asked about this stuff . . .
214: I tried it for "epitome" and was glad that I've been getting it right all along. It still bothers me that it's clearly derived from "tome" but the last bit is pronounced completely differently from the root word. Conclusion: English is stupid.
I pronounce it so that it rhymes with Marisa Tomei's last name.
Resurrecting this thread in the hope that even one other person enjoys this riff on the OP.
Said the actress to the unusually virile for his age archbishop.
I just never tried it diagonally before.
Did you know that there are direct-to-DVD children's movies so horrible that if you rent them, Redbox will apologize to you in your final receipt?
164: Trying Mexican food in other countries somehow became one of my traveling traditions. Best (or maybe, most adequate) was in Llubljana, worst was in Prague. The only one apparently owned by a Mexican was in Krakow.