Friday 10 January 2014

Menu Malapropisms

Cafes and restaurants are obviously the new greengrocers, if we're talking about the mangling of language e.g. "apple's 5p a pound".

I'm not going to waste my time, on a gruesomely hot evening, explaining why getting language right is important. If you don't choose your words correctly, or botch grammar, or include/omit punctuation marks, you risk being misunderstood.

My current irritation is moreish*/moorish.

Both adjectives may be used with respect to food. Both with quite different meanings. Substituting one for the other only confuses a diner.

Less contentiously, my mother's plum trees have gone berserk this summer, and produced a bountiful harvest of what I presume are Mirabelles. This comes a few weeks after we gorged ourselves on the first good crop of mulberries, and ahead of an imminent glut of mammoth figs, passionfruit and blackberries. So have a picture of some plum jam in the meantime:



*I happen to hate this word anyway. It seems lazy.

3 comments:

Cindy said...

Yep. I've come to hate both moorish and moreish for their widespread (mis)use.

As a mathsy type I get particularly itchy over incorrect use of units, usually for produce - "kg" and "per kg" perform inverse operations but get used interchangeably.

The New Epicurean said...

Cindy, that's a really excellent point and yes, another source of irritation!

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