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#10020 11/08/2000 8:08 AM
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A chum in the Mother Country wrote to me today: "As I have mentioned before, I am the very opposite of a gourmet, although I still have not found a word to describe that attribute." Can we help this poor fellow out? Is there an antonymn to gourmet?




#10021 11/08/2000 8:25 AM
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Not that I know of. Though a decent complement to it is gourmand (that too would be me!)


#10022 11/08/2000 9:34 AM
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How about "slob"? Lots of those here. More deep fried Mars Bars anyone?


#10023 11/08/2000 12:17 PM
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Maybe ascetic partially fills the bill, or in a coarser vein: omnivore.


#10024 11/08/2000 12:17 PM
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Couldn't he just say he has an eclectic taste?

What's your Mother Country, if you don't mind?


#10025 11/08/2000 12:29 PM
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omnivore

Sounds like a seefood diet, you see it you eat it.



#10026 11/08/2000 1:13 PM
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Panoptiphage?

Phagomanist?

Glutton?

Vulgarvore?

I give up...


#10027 11/08/2000 3:39 PM
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what, in the definition of gourmet, can we latch on to and oppose: one who enjoys food and drink with discrimation.
I don't think we want someone who *hates food.
one who *lacks discrimination? glutton, ravener, pantophagist, trencherman


#10028 11/08/2000 3:51 PM
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How about one who is discriminating in disliking some food and drink: picky? pre-teen?


#10029 11/08/2000 7:34 PM
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Jackie asks: "What's your Mother Country, if you don't mind?"

I suspect that I have done an un-PC thing by assuming the vantage point of an (ugly) American and referring to Britain as "the Mother Country." To whom do I need to apologize?







#10030 11/08/2000 7:42 PM
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I didn't realise that you were ugly - too tall, too short, too wide, too lumpy, too dark, too blonde? Aren't we all all beautiful in the eyes of God, Father Steve?


#10031 11/08/2000 8:43 PM
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Yes, of course we are all beautiful in the eyes of God, in much the same way that the most ghastly of babies in beautiful on the eyes of its mother. My "ugly" reference was to "The Ugly American" by Eugene Burdick and William J. Lederer.





#10032 11/08/2000 9:08 PM
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The title of your post set to me to thinking about gender again. When I first saw Patricentrism, I thought, "surely if it's in reference to the Mother Country, it should be Matricentrism." Then the anna dropped - there is no word to describe devotion to the Motherland, since patriotism is descended directly from pater. So Russians, who are fond of referring to their homeland as Mother Russia, or so I'm told, are right out of luck when it comes to a word describing their maternally nationalistic tendencies.Thinking about this would have troubled me, but I remembered the ultimate Antipodean anti-stress mantra - she'll be right.


#10033 11/08/2000 9:46 PM
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Right you are, sir.

patria = fatherland, native land.
patrimonium = property inherited from a father.
patrius = of a father, paternal, hereditary, ancestral, native.

mater = mother, source, origin.
maternus = of a mother, maternal.



#10034 11/08/2000 10:37 PM
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Predictably enough, people have coined the word "matriotism" to describe love of the mother country. Whilst not in any dictionary, as far as I know, it's probably only a matter of time. Try typing matriotism into your favourite search engine. Here are a couple of samples:

http://hpk.felk.cvut.cz/tis/Voc/208.html

http://www.columbia.edu/~jbs39/words.html

Seems it appears in Catch-22 as well.



#10035 11/08/2000 11:56 PM
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>Whilst not in any dictionary, as far as I know...

oh, it's in the OED2, although it's listed as a "nonce word".

matriotism
nonce-wd. [Altered from patriotism, after L. mQter mother.]

Love of one's mother country or of one's ‘alma mater’.

1856 Lowell Lett. (1894) I. 301, I am delighted with your matriotism ‘Rome, Venice, Cambridge!’ 1885 H. C. Beeching in Academy 14 Feb. 109/2 Though Mr. Lang's matriotism is thus divided, he has only one fatherland.




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