wasn't the definitive story about Alice sung by Dr Hook?

I thought it was sung by Arlo Guthrie.

Oh, was it him who lived next door to her? I did rather wonder ...

mind you, it was one of my favorite tv series when it showed here on PBS (public broadcast service)about i was going to say 10.. but it must be closer to 15 years ago.. i never read the book (there is a book? i am guessing here)

Yeah, Helen, it was back in those benighted days when the film was made from the book rather than the other way around as seems so common these days ...

Anyway, wasn't the definitive story about Alice sung by Dr Hook?
As I recall, Consuelo is our resident expert on A.L.I.C.E.

"You can get
Anything you want
At Alice's Restaurant ('ceptin' Alice!)"

Or mebbe consuelo's sauteéd mushrooms?

I burn for a nice plate of mushrooms.

post-edit This made more sense before W'ON corrected his spelling! (mumble,mumble)Edit suteéd to sauteéd on me, will ya! Wreck my riposte, will ya! I still love ya anyway

wasn't the definitive story about Alice sung by Dr Hook?

I thought it was sung by Arlo Guthrie.

Hell, no! Arlo wouldn't sing something as crass as that. Alice was sung by Smokie (probably they're only hit but for twenty-one years they've been living off it).

Arlo sang the wonderful Alice's Restuarant, Motorcycle (significance of the pickle) song, Coming into Los Angeles, City of New Orleans, In my darkest hour and many others.

Dr. Hook had a few hits on the late '70s and early '80s but the only one I can remember is When you're in love with a beautiful woman.

Over here (and I presume elsewhere, too), the wowdy wabble add on the line Alice! Alice? Who the F*** is Alice? to that Smokie 'classic'. Tedious after a few times. Unbearable after a few years.

Alice was sung by Smokie

But was that the definitive story about Alice?

Define Alice.

Um, with the utmost respect...the word is sauté. If it must be Englishified then sautéd would be it.

When you have a combination of E's (as when you are according a verb to a feminine noun), the accent goes on the first E. Exceptions are extremely rare. The only way you can have an accent on second E is if the first accented E is an intergral part of the word and not a tool for accordance. Eg. the word créer (to create). If you say "he created" it would be "il a créé." That word is also one of the rarest when you conjugate to feminine because you have three Es in a row "elle a créée."

Well, bel, thanks for your well-intended correction. But I've been involved with the restaurant business for more years than I care to admit, and I've always seen and used the double-e form, sautéed, for the transitive verb (with the accent on the first "e", that was just a typo or late-night mind-flip ). I searched a variety of hits on OneLook and it's listed as the preferred usage to sautéd, or even as the only form of the two.

Perhaps, as the etymology suggests, the one-e is the French form and the double-e is the common English variable. The menu might read, for instance, shrimp sauté, but sautéed shrimp in the v.t., not sautéd shrimp. Here's a couple supporting citations:

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.

SYLLABICATION: sau·té
TRANSITIVE VERB: Inflected forms: sau·téed, sau·té·ing, sau·tés
To fry lightly in fat in a shallow open pan.
NOUN: A dish of food so prepared.
ETYMOLOGY:
French, sautéd, from past participle of sauter, to leap, from Old French, from
Latin saltre. See saltation.

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate

Main Entry: 1sau·té
Variant(s): also sau·te /so-'tA, sO-/
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from past participle of sauter to jump, from Latin
saltare -- more at SALTATION
Date: 1813
: a sautéed dish
- sauté adjective

And this fascinating site, www.foodlexicon.net http://www.xs4all.nl/~margjos/index.html, which translates culinary words and phrases into five different languages offers sautéed as the English form: http://www.xs4all.nl/~margjos/satxtgb.htm

Somebody more creative than I am should be working on a parody along the lines of
"A one é-d mushroom, he's a_____
a two é-d mushroom, ..."

Any takers?


But seriously, folks, mushroom being masculin in French would indicate that it should be described with one-é and not two: "sautéd". Unless the argument is being made that the second e is from the English past tense, thus "sauté-ed." But in that case if it were to be a feminin noun, say a potato, wouldn't you have to call it "sautéeed?" Anyone ever seen that one? I haven't.

PS Do they call it "sauté" in the first place because when you drop whatever-it-is into the hot fat it jumps around in the pan for a bit? Or is that just a cutesy after-the-fact observation?

In English, the past tense of weak verbs* is formed by adding -ed. It the verb ends in e already, it is not doubled and the past tense is formed simply by adding -d. I respectfully submit that é is not e. Therefore the past tense of sauté is sautéed and the past tense of sautée is also sautéed.

*New verbs added to the language are correctly taken to be weak.

Dunno about any of that linguistic mumbo-jumbo, but the word is sautéed. So you can ask why, but not what ...

Says so in all three dictionaries I've looked up. One allows that some people might want to spell it without the extra "e", but that's clearly not the favoured approach.