Unfortunately, language doesn’t work that way.
Are you going to take me to task for something every region of the country does?
Of course not. You seem to have missed my point, which was that regionalisms such as this are neither correct nor incorrect. You’ll notice that I’m not asserting that “crayfish” is the proper term by merit of being the most common usage. They are just different names for the same thing.
I got your point. I apparently didn’t get across a bit of facetiousness that I was going for originally. I hope I haven’t upset anyone by not being more accepting of alternate usages. 
Not me. But beware the Word Nazis! 
Noted and heeded.
All due respect, but anyone who keeps a pee can by the bed has no business correcting other people’s behavior.
Daniel
I’m with you, chile. crawfish make the world go 'round.
Hee!
- Jonathan ‘half Cajun, half Chicagoan’ Chance
Hijack brought back. As I mentioned above, I say “crayfish.” The first time I was in the Deep South (I was about 16), I was in a restaurant and asked for “puh-cahn” pie for dessert. The waitress had no idea what I wanted until I pointed it out on the menu and she exclaimed, “Oh, you want ‘pee-can’ pie!”
Wow, thanks everyone!
engineer_comp_geek 's post illustrates that there is just no way of knowing if non-mammals have “pain” as we know it. None of us, apparently, can do more then speculate, and most of us are biased.
After reading engineers links, I don’t think I will ever eat a lobster again. Half of me admires them for being such complex, social, long-living, opportunistic creatures. I can’t eat something I can identify with.
My other half now considers them waaaay too icky to eat. Would I eat a boiled, enormous, aggressive, cannibalistic spider? No thanks! What difference does it make that it lives in water?
Beelzebubba, I’ve considered your point. Yes, I feel all living things must die, and it is the quality of life -and death- that matters most. That’s why I boycot industry-raised pork, but will eat horseflesh. YMMV.
Shrimp and mussels, I still dunno. I found brane damaj’s point quite convincing: even four minutes of pain while being boiled probably hurts less then being picked apart by a predator.
Still, can’t somebody market a kitchentool that will euthanize the critters? Preferably by bringing them in a state of chemically induced euphoria first? 
Just to continue the hijack… Are ‘crawdads’/‘crawdaddies’ the same things as crayfish\crawfish?
“The rich man has a canopy over his bed, and the poor man…”
Whether or not a lobster or crab feels pain, boiling them alive is probably the quickest possible way to kill them, and thus, IMO, the most humane way. As brane damaj points out, because they are so small, boiling kills them much more rapidly than it would a human.
I suppose you could kill them by freezing them first, but this is a prolonged process, and who’s to say that this isn’t also painful? How else would you kill them? Beheading? Not real practical on a crab. And if you did it on a lobster or crayfish, because the nervous system is not all that centralized the separated parts of the body would take some time to die (possibly feeling “pain” all the time). I suppose you could kill them by anesthesia or lethal injection, but again, this may not be more rapid than boiling.
In nature, crabs, shrimp, and lobsters almost invariably die by being eaten alive by some other creature. I don’t think boiling is likely to be significantly more painful than that.
Yep. I’ve even got a cousin who goes by ‘Crawdaddy’, God help me.
Well, sadly, his real name is ‘Darling’. He kind of prefers the nickname at this point.
Never quite has forgiven his folks, though.
That makes no sense whatsoever. The correct pronunciation in the the South (where they are grown!) is Pu-cahn. Anything else is Yankee-speak. Notice that I live in Yankee territory now but that one is really offensive to me.
Also, they are CRAWFISH! Louisiana has the most of them by far of any state. They are raised on farms and a staple of diet in parts. They are “CRAWFISH”. Anything else is really offensive and seen as ignorant. For everybody that called them something else, I just lowered your IQ and Cultural Awareness rating by a full 10 points. I hope that will teach you something for the next time.
As I recall, live lobster is an asian delicacy.
The shell of the tail is ripped away, and the tail meat thinly sliced from the still living lobster and served raw. This practice caused consternation when NZ restaurants started catering to tourists in this way. Eventually it was decided that spiking the head with a knife first was sufficient to prevent the lobster suffering - although some chefs favoured a quick chill in the freezer to stupefy the lobster.
I like lobster - cooked - but I think that this is a fairly barbaric way to treat an animal that you are going to eat. Food animals deserve a bit of respect.
Simon
It taught me that you’re unnecessarily jerkish about perfectly legitimate regionalisms. I don’t assume people who call shopping carts “buggies” are morons, and I’d appreciate the same of you. The South is not the dictator of language and usage for the entire world.
Well, that’s what happened. We were in Georgia (maybe that doesn’t qualify as the Deep South, sorry), and I think we were in a Denny’s or Shoney’s or some place like that.
I grew up in Maryland, and I’ve always said “puh-cahn” and that’s how everyone I know says it. The waitress had a very strong Southern accent, almost that stereotypical “hick” accent.
She had come over and asked, “Kin ah git ya’ll sumpin’ fo’ zert?”
When I asked for the “puh-cahn” pie, she had no idea what I wanted. I said it again, and then pointed to it. She laughed and said, “Oh, you want ‘pee-can’ pah!” as if I was the one who was saying it wrong, and I’m sure to her, I was was.
I also call those creatures “crayfish” but I know others call them “crawfish.” It’s a regionalism, just like soda and pop or hero and sub and grinder (as evidenced in this thread. )
The March 2004 issue of Dive Training magazine has an article on page 85 called “Do Fish Feel Pain?” I looked, but could not find the article online. Obviously I can’t post the whole article here, but here are some highlights:
The professor injected a group of rainbow trout in the snout with bee venom, another group with acetic acid (the article noted the irony to fish’n’chips fans that acetic acid is the acid in malt vinegar), and a third group with saline as a control group. A fourth group was handled by researchers, but not injected. This was to rule out the stress of experimentation being the cause of any reaction.
Sensors known as nociceptors are designed to warn the organism about “noxious stimulation” and are the “fromt line defense against impaling oneself on sharp objects”.
“Not so fast,” the article continues. James Rose of the University of Wyoming Department of psychology and Department of Zoology and Physiology says that “fish can’t possible feel pain, even if they display a few suspicious-looking behaviours, because they don’t have the brains for it.”
The article states that the medical definition of pain is “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with tissue damage… The key is the emotional component.” That is, in order to feel pain, the brain needs the “wiring” to experience both sensation and emotion. “That’s the problem,” Rose says. “In fish, there’s not a snowball’s chance because they don’t have the hardware to have consciousness.”
The article continues:
Sneddon says that not all fish (e.g. sharks and rays – elasmobranchs) pass the test because they don’t have nociceptors.
There are two columns of “interpretations”.
So it appears that while fish demonstrate behavious that we would call reaction to pain, it’s not at all clear that they actually feel “pain”. I don’t know if lobsters have nociceptors, but I’m guessing (and it’s only a guess) that they don’t. In any case, they don’t have the apparatus to feel “pain” on a level discussed in the article.
Never cook dead crabs with live ones, unless you’re the one doing the killing. Toxins in a dead crab can spread to the others. The best way to cook crabs is to kill them by chopping them in half, then cleaning out the insides (remember to remove the gills). Do not eat the “crab butter”, since this is where many toxins are concentrated.
Singer Emmylou Harris has noted that adding another voice to a triad gives you a crawdad.