So how’s your soul food? On par with Charlotte or Atlanta? 
Right. Your average restaurant in a small country town 30 or 40 years ago was pretty basic: about the same level as some restaurants in similarly sized towns in the US are now, once you get away from the McDonalds and the Subway.
Yeah, whatever. Tony started out by slamming Cecil and most of his fans, so anyone who gets riled up by Cecil’s response ought to march down to the pharmacy and buy a bottle of perspective, and should probably grab a bottle of No More Tears on the way out.
The prescriptivists’ cries for acknowledgment as King of English are pathetic and irritating enough, but the worst kind are the asshats who claim that their dialect’s usage is The Only Right One. Claiming that the American usage of the word “entree” is wrong because it’s not the same as the Australian (or Irish or Jamaican or whatever) usage is just as absurd as an American claiming that “boot” is the wrong word for “trunk”, or a Chicano English speaker claiming that “barely” is the only right word for referring to something that happened a short time ago.
Well, sure. “The average restaurant” in New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles is a Denny’s. Looking at the average restaurant in any given American locale is missing the point.
The same thing is happening in LA, San Francisco and San Diego. That’s hardly a cite.
Oh, yeah, that’s some real diligent social science work there.
Wendell Wagner, is it so difficult to use the quote tags? It makes for cleaner reading. I’d really appreciate it.
Having met “the locals” from “many cities in the US”, I can tell you that their tastes are probably quite a bit more suspect than those in LA, Chicago and New York. How many of “the locals” “highly recommended” Applebee’s?
And there was no “dumbing down for Americans”–Cecil just used the word for what it means in his dialect, and that of the majority of his readers. Calling that “dumbing down” is absurd. If I wrote an article about soccer which called the game football, would I be “dumbing down” my language for the drooling British neanderthals who can’t figure out what soccer is? Of course not, that’s ludicrous.
Giles writes:
> He even gets baked beans wrong: they are eaten in Australia, but not as much
> as they are in the US, where they are a very common accompaniment to meals.
Actually, it’s the U.K. where baked beans are most commonly eaten, certainly much more than in the U.S. I suspect that more baked beans are eaten in Australia than in the U.S., but I haven’t been in Australia enough to be sure about this. I think that Cecil confused British and Australian cuisine in writing this column.
Indeed, I suspect that this is what happened when Cecil wrote this column: He read the letter without immediately noticing where it came from. He carelessly decided that it was somebody British, since the British also use the word “entree” in the way that Australians do. He decided to throw in a snide comment about British cuisine, so he wrote that nasty crack about baked beans and Marmite. Then he went back and reread the letter and noticed that the letter writer was Australian, not British. He decided he could quickly fix his mistake by changing the reference to Vegemite instead of Marmite. He forgot that baked beans were not as common in the Australia as in the U.K.
That’s quite possible. I’m still amazed by this, though:
They’re nothing of the sort.
.
An interesting speculation, but not true. I happened to see an early draft, and there was no doubt whatsoever that Cecil knew whence the query.
In terms of measuring “average” restaurants based on personal experience, I find I usually eat much better when I’m travelling. At home, we often eat out at mediocre restaurants that are nearby, because the weather or traffic are crappy and we don’t want to travel. When we’re in a different country, we’re usually on vacation and eating well. So, I don’t think that either anecdote or personal experience amount to much.
Any article in a Travel Section or Food Section of a newspaper has the same bias – this week, they want you to think it’s wonderful to travel to Peru, so they write about the great food in Peru. Next week, ditto ditto Poland. The author of that article for the LA Times is a food critic. What’s she going to do, visit crummy (or average) restaurants in a foreign country and write about that experience? She wouldn’t last long.
To turn the subject to the actual column, my lovely wife has a couple of comments:[ol]
[li]“Six courses”? That’s nothing! Fannie Farmer (!) calls for twelve.[/li]
[li]The traditional entrée was typically something the cook used to show off with – puff pastries stuffed with larks’ brains in Aztec-chocolate sauce and that sort of thing, the sort of thing that Americans Don’t Eat. This probably had something to do with the semantic slippage. Of course, the English don’t like that sort of thing, either; a little ditty called The Roast Beef of Olde England used to be nearly as popular as God Save the Queen.[/li][/ol]
Really, this isn’t usenet.
Given Cecil’s perfection, I took the “beans and Vegemite” remark to be a reference to the legendary uber-Bogan Shane Warne.
Brilliant on the field, he is famously narcissistic and unsophisticated off it. He migrated to Britain to escape the tabloids. The title of his autobiography is Shane Warne: My Autobiography. When the Australian cricket team dined in good restaurants, Warnie would get a pizza delivered to the table.
And on tour in India in 1998 [
](http://www.indianexpress.com/res/web/pIe/ie/daily/19980306/06550494.html)
Strong stuff coming from a country that doesn’t even know where that shore is, and is itself stuck in a sticky-sweet oleaginous sludge. Standard Australian cheap’n’cheerful cuisine is all over the American equivalent, and mid-to-top end Australian is at least as good and far cheaper than the American counterpart. Sounds like Cece has never actually been here.
Far from being a matter of local dialect (in my experience anyway) it’s used for the first course (“appetizer”) everywhere in the world apart from the US. Can you cite otherwise?
It doesn’t matter. It’s a dialect feature, and it’s not present in all dialects. It’s just as wrong to call an appetizer an entree in the US as it is to call an entree an appetizer in Australia/Falkland Islands/Scotland/what-have-you.
I meant to say, “…as it is to call a main course an entree in Australia…”
So, Australians’ idea of “reinterpreting” cuisine is to use fresh ingredients? This doesn’t really say much for you’uns’ culinary acumen. 
Wrong again, Mr. Dope. In almost all places in the World, entree (or its equivalent, “entrada,” etc.) refers to the first dish served during a meal, not the main dish. Also, please do not use the English or England as a point of reference regarding food, unless you are discussing dried-out, thinly-cut, tasteless roast beef.
Welcome to the SDMB, Rohequi. Since there was already a thread about this column, I’ve merged your thread into the existing one. Not a big deal, just trying to keep everybody on the same page.
Isn’t that a bit like going to Antarctica to escape the cold?
Or are writing in the 21st Century. If however you are writing in the earlier part of the previous century, it’s certainly a point to stay clear of.
As to the OP, I agree that English, of whichever dialect, has so many anomalies that snarking at just one is a bit pointless. However, as someone who struggles to speak and understand it every day, I do like consistency and logic in language. Given the choice between a usage for a word that will get me understood in any English speaking nation, and one that won’t, I prefer the former. And if it’s a usage that is sufficiently consistent that I can figure out what it probably means without actually having to be told because of links to other words of similar meaning, that’s a bonus. Using entree to mean a middle course fails both tests.
As I say, the number of words that fail such tests is so extensive as to make complaint an exercise at tilting at windmills, but if we are going to discuss the subject, then I’d have to say that the US usage of entree doesn’t have anything going for it.
Um, yes.
C K Dexter Haven writes:
> An interesting speculation, but not true. I happened to see an early draft, and
> there was no doubt whatsoever that Cecil knew whence the query.
Then why did Cecil talk about baked beans in reference to Australian cuisine? It looks to me like the following three things are the only possibilities: 1) Hostile Dialect is wrong and baked beans really are common in Austalian cuisine. 2) Cecil was momentarily careless and for a second thought he was writing about British cuisine. 3) Cecil couldn’t be bothered to do any research on the matter and really is mistaken about how common baked beans are in Australia.
I wrote:
> 1) Hostile Dialect is wrong and baked beans really are common in Austalian
> cuisine.
And speaking of carelessness, but my carelessness in this case, it was Giles who said that baked beans aren’t common in Australia, not Hostile Dialect.
Cecil wasn’t seriously saying that only those who use “entree” in the American sense are using the term correctly. Once again, remember that Cecil is trying to be snide in his answers. This was especially true in this case, since he was replying to a snide question.