Posts by Kong
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We creative wee apes will play with anything we can, and English will take over the nearest available word.
It's incredible like that. But to be fair to the genuine pesto toilers, English should Anglicize it into something like Parmesan. Pestoil perhaps? Is it kinder on a word to steal it and misuse it, or bastardize it, or just ignore it? Which is the greater good, or the lesser evil (depending how you see it). Stealing it means the bitterness of knowing that people are eating something and thinking it's pesto, and if it's crap, blaming that on Italians. Bastardizing it means the bitterness of hearing a lovely word from your old language strangled to death. And ignoring it completely and making up a new word, whilst of course being totally derivative of a good from another culture, is the ultimate in theft, where someone gets to actually claim they've come up with something new, just by changing the name.
Steal a man's pesto and you rob him for a day. Steal his recipe for pesto and you rob him for life.
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Heh, all class. My annoying father in law insists that unless you peel potatoes, then boil them, they aren't real potatoes, either. I gave up long ago, and just accept that I'm eating pseudopotatoes.
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I don't, but if I have cousins who do and if I tried I'm pretty sure I'd do a better job of it than Kapiti Cheeses. Then again, who wouldn't?
I feel fairly sure that I wouldn't. But I'm even more sure I'd never try. If I wanted flash parmesan that bad, I'd surely just fork out for some foreign stuff.
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Yes, I wouldn't be caught dead buying ready-made pesto. If nothing else, it's cheaper than making your own and there's gotta be a reason for that.
Scale?
Given for what passes for 'parmesan' around here, I have strong doubts they'd buy the right ingredients.
You make your own parmesan? Wow. I bet that one's harder to do cheaper than a milk factory.
I also think Brinkley was being silly with the evil chemical line. There's plenty of perfectly natural stuff that's deadly too. I have a lovely bush of Deadly Nightshade berries in my back yard now, which I found hiding in amongst my cherry tomatoes. Sprinkle a few of those berries in your pesto and you'll know all about it. 100% natural tasty death in an easy spreadable form.
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Isn't making sweeping judgments what having a sense of taste and style is all about? Or do they need to be informed sweeping judgments?
If so, then how can you really be sure that there isn't at least one nice coffee at Starbucks? Some experiments are too painful and distasteful to finish.
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What is this "6 in the morning" thing? I have not heard of it.
You may know it as 'sparrow's fart'.
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Wise words.
Well I know the problem. I don't know the solution, though. Best I can do is just try to learn to have a good time in a bar without being drunk, and hope others learn from the example. The best trick I've found so far is to just start talking. The more time your mouth is moving the less time it spends sipping, and it's not like you're hampering your conversational powers by staying sober longer.
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@Russell
I'd go further than simply proposing a lower excise tax on low-alcohol drinks -- I would oblige bars to sell them significantly cheaper than full-strength drinks. I was out recently and, mindful of the fact that I was driving home, ordered an Amstel Light at the bar. Eight bucks. That's crazy.
Tricky call. Sounds hard to administer - is there currently any body that goes around and checks that pricing follows laws in bars?
It can suck for drivers. A very tough cultural issue, and I don't think cheaper low alcohol beer would solve more than a small amount of the problem (but it might help). There's always the option of buying a normal beer and just drinking it twice as slowly, or only half of it. In fact there's a thousand ways not to drink too much - the real problem is the pressure that people come under to drink a lot.
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Kong, I ride on the shoulders of giants and numberless unknown experimenters with the most inclusive (not to mention devouring) language we humans have yet invented-*
Don't we all?
Standardisation and simplification is poison to English.
Sometimes, sometimes not. Depends what purpose you are talking about. For precise communication standardization is virtually necessary. In covering every idea expressible, standardization is virtually impossible, and attempting it is probably undesirable.
But hey, people who want spell checkers aren't usually concerned with standardization and simplification. They just don't like typos. That's my main reason for using one, and when you have to pick one, you have to make a choice. EN_GB is every bit as arbitrary as EN_US, or even EN_NZ. It's the EN part we really want. I wouldn't mind actually merging all of the EN dictionaries. There's a thought...must research it.
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Islander, you invent your own language. Nothing wrong with that. It's just easy to take the piss out of, in answer to WTF. Personally, I like your style, it shows strong character.