|
|
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981
Pooh-Bah
|
Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981 |
>and got curious about the author ...
Sad, Jackie, sad. Funny how the internet works, you think that a computer is going to save you time and maybe even make you some money, then ... some hours later ... you discover that you are now much beter informed about Brigit, Óláf and Guþlac but you still haven't made the beds/completed urgent assignment/fed the cat. So much useless information, so little time!
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jan 2001
Posts: 13,858 |
Dear Jackie: I searched for your "GuÞlac" using "th" instead of the "Þ", and found a whole long list of lovely sites about him and his sister Pega. I am indeed grateful to you for giving me a clue that will yield many pleasant hours of browsing.Just in case anyone else is interested, here is the URL: http://www.umilta.net/pega.htmlP.S. Interestingly, the manuscripts spell his name with "th" not with a "Þ".
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 1,289
veteran
|
|
OP
veteran
Joined: Nov 2000
Posts: 1,289 |
You are correct, Jo, that the getup I described for weddings is properly called "morning dress", as "evening dress" is the narrower swallow-tail coat, black, with black trousers (satin stripes on the side of the legs, no cuffs), wing collar and white bow tie and single-breasted white waistcoat (black tie and waistcoat is a permissable, but seldom seen, alternative). You don't hear the term "tuxedo" that much in more proper circles because it is considered déclassé; the correct term is "dinner jacket" and an invitation requesting that one wear it does, indeed, say "black tie". No real gentlemen would ever wear one in any color other than black, midnight blue being a possible exception, and the white version only in Florida or other tropical clime. BTW, the French word for dinner jacket is "smoking" and that is the notation on an invitation, sometimes leading the inexperienced to expect a smoker, which is a horse of another color (blue).
Weddings in the late afternoon or in the evening are popular here; my son's wedding last year was in the garden of a 200 year old inn at 6:00 p.m.; the gentlemen wore dinner jackets. We attended a very elegant wedding a few years ago at the great Basilica in downtown Baltimore which was at 7:00 p.m.; men wore the soup and fish, as it's called here -- full evening dress (white tie).
Not to introduce a food topic, I find it interesting that English wedding cakes are fruit cakes. Fruit cake is an object of jokes here. American wedding cakes are usually a plain white cake, sometimes yellow, with white buttercream icing with lavish decorations, although I have been to weddings with a chocolate cake (white icing) when the principals were chocoholics.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613 |
fed the cat
AUGH--she was supposed to go to the vet today! No time, now. You're right, I am sad (Brit. def.). I'll see you-all later.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981
Pooh-Bah
|
|
Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981 |
>I find it interesting that English wedding cakes are fruit cakes. The problem is that the traditonal British Wedding Cake is in three layers with columns holding up the layers, http://www.weddingguide.co.uk as anything other than a fruit cake isn't strong enough. They generally are made with the really firm Royal icing that breaks your teeth if you try to bite into it. The top layer is meant to have the icing removed and kept, so that it can be re-iced for the Christening (as many Christenings take place before the weddings these days it is dying out). All celebration cakes, special birthdays, christenings, Christmas, especially amongst the older generation are generally fruit cakes. We have the expression "nutty as a fruit cake" but it doesn't seem to be as big a joke as in the USA. I was surprised that traditonal American wedding cakes are sponge cakes but I see that they generally are piled on top of each other without columns, so they don't need to be so strong http://www.weddingbasics.com/images/cakes/cake_2.jpg. Funny, the more you look at wedding sites, the more attractive eloping to Gretna Green becomes.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981
Pooh-Bah
|
|
Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981 |
>I am sad (Brit. def.)
It is probably a YART but does "sad" only work in that way in the UK?
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296 |
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981
Pooh-Bah
|
|
Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981 |
Balti dishes are used to making Balti, a kind of indian inspired (if not, orginated) fast food. Balti restaurants in the UK originated in Birmingham and spread rapidly. The basic idea is that a base mix (cooking mix) is made up of roasted and combined spices, then at the final stages a masala (sprinkling mix) is added but not cooked into the ingredients. The best kind of dishes are like small woks, especially well-worn ones, rather than the shiny things (probably kept at the back of the cupboard with the fondue set) advertised on the wedding site as more of a fashion item than a cooking item. Here is an extract from http://www.owlsprings.com/the_balti_page.html which (for wordies, rather than foodies) gives a flavour of the controversy attached to the origins of the name. What's a Balti?
It has nothing to do with Baltimore or Baltinglass, but a great deal to do with Birmingham....
The Balti is an Indian dish representative of a style of cooking which some say is native to Baltistan. It's a kind of curry, its ingredients usually assembled and cooked quickly in a manner reminiscent of a stir-fry.
The heart of this style of cooking is a cast-iron pot, originally also called the balti. The balti evolved into a half-hemispherical pot as likely to be made of steel as iron, and usually called the karahi or karai. A Balti is usually both cooked in the karahi, and served at the table in it. Typically served with Balti is naan bread, a thinnish leavened bread (somewhat like pita bread) torn up and used as an eating implement, to scoop up the Balti and get at the sauce. This utensil-less approach turns Balti into one of the "sport" foods, like ribs: you get it, or it gets you, and sometimes both.
Balti in Europe started attracting notice during the last decade in Birmingham in England -- particularly in the city's Sparkhill and Sparkbrook areas, home of some of the oldest and best Balti houses, and now increasingly known as "the Balti Belt." Word of the wonderfulness of Balti began to spread through the rest of the UK and elsewhere, with the result that Balti is rapidly turning into one of the "hot" things in the food world (to the amusement of those of us who've liked it for years).
...Just a note here about the origins of the name "Balti": various correspondents have written to say that Balti doesn't have anything to do with Baltistan, which they both describe as an area where most people are vegetarian, and not likely to have evolved a cuisine with so much meat in it. Saad As-Jandal adds, "It seems like the Pakistani community in Birmingham and elsewhere have attatched a romantic notion that these so called Balti dishes originate from Baltistan, whereas from my knowledge it is more commonly found in Peshawar North West Pakistan, where it is known as 'Karhai'. -- So please spread the word and let it be known."
Does Balti mean 'bucket'?
Well, yes, it does. At least it seems to in Hindi: how many other Subcontinental languages share the etymology, we're not sure.
Some controversy over the word has bubbled up in the last few years. There are those (among them some fairly influential restaurant owners) who claim that in their vocabulary, "balti" is "a dirty word". Rumours abound that the dish, or cooking style, was invented as a way to put drunken British "lager louts" in their place by "feeding them out of a bucket".
We decline to get involved in speculation about this, fascinating as etymology can be. The truth about Balti, in the UK at least, is that that is the name which most fans of the cuisine most readily recognize it, at the moment. Other restaurants may choose to move away from it: that's their choice. Meanwhile, where you don't see the term "balti", try looking for the words "karai" or "karahi", other names for the basic utensil. To a certain degree, the utensil determines the cooking style, as a corollary of the "form follows function" rule. And the whole point, after all, is to enjoy the food...
Incidentally, over the last couple of years -- in the face of the continuing popularity of the cooking style, perhaps? -- some of the personalities who had most vehemently insisted that Balti either "didn't exist" or was "not really Indian food at all" have done some surprising about-faces. The name of one prominent author of numerous Indian cookbooks, who not only refused to acknowledge Balti, but didn't even believe in curry, now appears on the labels of a major Indian food manufacturer's jars of Balti "mix". Life is strange...
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981
Pooh-Bah
|
|
Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 1,981 |
>Oh, one other thing. I noticed that the espresso maker had been spelled "Expresso maker." Is the 'x' common in British spelling of espresso? Just curious. Yes, I've definitely seen both, on searching you can even find both on the same page: http://www.nespressostore.com/expresso-maker-d.html. It reminds me of the zucchini debate, I suspect that it was anglicised in some places to begin with to be “expresso” then the more correct “espresso” took over, in some cases it is is probably a spelling error. I looked up “Costa Coffee” which is a bit like Starbucks and they use “espresso”. Manufacturers of some machines, on the other hand, seem to call them “Expresso machines”. Aha: I found this wonderful coffee site: http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~adb/coffee/coffee.html 3. How do you spell Espresso?
By far, the most common spelling used throughout the world today is "espresso". This is a shortened form of the original Italian name for the drink "caffe espresso" (accent marks omitted). This spelling is considered to be the correct spelling by the vast majority of of coffee consumers, vendors, retailers, and producers.
Some English language dictionaries also list "expresso" as a variant spelling. However, this does not mean the spelling is 'equally valid'. (see the post by Jesse Sheidlower included below)
It was pointed out during the great "espresso vs. expresso" debate (spring 94) that the Italian alphabet does not even contain the letter "X", which is incorrect.
Further, it was discovered that at least three dictionaries contained incorrect definitions of the word "espresso". The American Heritage Dictionary gave the following definition:
"A strong coffee brewed by forcing steam under pressure through darkly roasted, powdered coffee beans." The Oxford English Dictionary said:
"Coffee brewed by forcing steam through powdered coffee beans" The Webster New World Dictionary gives: "coffee prepared in a special machine from finely ground coffee beans, through which steam under high pressure is forced." All three of these are wrong. In fact, espresso is a strong coffee brewed by quickly forcing hot water through darkly roasted, finely ground coffee beans.
(Some espresso makers do use steam, but only to force the hot water through the ground coffee. The steam NEVER touches the coffee. Many espresso makers use no steam at all. Instead, they use either a pump or a piston to quickly force hot water through the ground coffee.)
Once these errors and the origins of the word "espresso" had been pointed out, the argument "but expresso is in the dictionary" quickly began to crumble. The final death blow to this position came in a post by dictionary editor Jesse Sheidlower. This post is reproduced in its entirety below:
From: Jesse Sheidlower
I find this thread fascinating. I regret that it demonstrates an unfamiliarity with dictionaries and how to use them, but no matter. I believe that I am the only dictionary editor to participate in this discussion, so let me waste a bit more bandwidth addressing some of the points made so far, and introducing a few others:
o The OED, Second Edition, does include _espresso_ and _expresso_, the latter being a variant of the former. It correctly derives it from Italian _caffe espresso_.
[Accents left off here.] Whoever claimed it derives the term from a would-be Italian _caffe expresso_ was in error.
o There _is_ an "x" in Latin and Italian.
o There are four major American dictionaries (published by Merriam Webster, Webster's New World, Random House, and American Heritage). The most recent edition of each gives _espresso_ as the main form, and_expresso_ as a variant only. The fact that _expresso_ is listed in the dictionary does not mean that it is equally common: the front matter for each dictionary explains this. The person who claimed that three dictionaries including OED give _expresso_ as "equally valid" was in error.
o Dictionaries, in general, do not dictate usage: they reflect the usage that exists in the language. If a dictionary says that _espresso_ is the main spelling, it means that in the experience of its editors (based on an examination of the language), _espresso_ is notably more common. It does not mean that the editors have a vendetta against _expresso_.
o To the linguist who rejects the authority of dictionaries: I agree that language is constantly changing; I'm sure that every dictionary editor in the country does as well.
Dictionaries are outdated before they go to press. But I think they remain accurate to a large extent. Also, if you are going to disagree with the conclusions of a dictionary, you should be prepared to back yourself up.
I can defend, with extensive written evidence, our decision to give _espresso_ as the preferred form.
o The spelling _espresso_ is the form used by the copy desks of the _New York Times,_ _Gourmet,_ _Bon Appetit,_ The _Wine Spectator,_ the _Wall St. Journal,_ the _L.A. Times,_ _Time,_ _Newsweek,_ and to my knowledge every other major or minor newspaper or magazine, general or food-related, in the English-speaking world. The fact that a handwritten menu on an Italian restaurant door spells it "expresso" is trivial by comparison.
o In sum: though both _espresso_ and _expresso_ are found, the former is by far the more common. It is also to be favored on immediate etymological evidence, since the Italian word from which it is directly borrowed is spelled _espresso_. The form _espresso_ is clearly preferred by all mainstream sources.
Jesse T Sheidlower. Editor.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 11,613 |
Oh, wail! You have made me desperately miss my beloved shanks. Where are you, darlin'?
|
|
|
|
Forums16
Topics13,913
Posts229,372
Members9,182
| |
Most Online3,341
Dec 9th, 2011
|
|
|
0 members (),
381
guests, and
1
robot. |
|
Key:
Admin,
Global Mod,
Mod
|
|
|
|
