Good grief, I’ve read this like 5 times and it keeps looking like you said you hated celery. That can’t be right, can it? I mean, one of the Trinity?
Dinner and a show!
Sometimes, YouTube really DOES serve a purpose.
An odd one: I liked to stop by a certain Chinese place for their $5 lunch buffet every payday. One day, there was a sign on the door announcing that the place had added lobster to their lunch buffet in honor of their Silver Anniversary. Lobster remained on the menu for months without ever raising the price.
My workplace later moved to the opposite end of the neighborhood. A few years after that, we moved to the building next door to where we had been. I looked for that Chinese restaurant and did not see it, nor did I see where it had been. I’m guessing its building had been redeveloped and the restaurant owner decided to go out with a bang.
There are those who dislike celery. I’m one of them.
I don’t know anything about the transformation from Latin. Someone long ago told me this was a unique word in English. He said no other word used a silent C like that. I don’t if he was right about that or not.
When I see the word in writing it sounds like vik-chew-ul in my head, even though I pronounce it correctly when spoken.
I used to love bleu cheese dressing. Then I worked in a restaurant that made its own, and the recipe included celery seed. All I could taste when I ate that dressing was the celery seed. It completely ruined bleu cheese for me. Today, 25 years later, I still can’t taste bleu cheese without also tasting celery seed, even when I’m the one who made the dressing and know damn well it has no celery seed in it.
Everything of the slightest value in the restaurant simply disappears overnight, leaving the unpaid staff to accumulate out front the next morning looking unhappy, and a string of creditors trying to find the owner’s new out-of-state address to serve process.
Celery is great in a trinity, a mirepoix, or a really good ragout; it sucks when it’s been stewed beyond recognition in a faux Chinese corn starch gravy.
WTF? Consider my gob thoroughly smacked. This is the most astounding thing I have read in a long time.
The Beverly Hillbillies were using a much more educated vocabulary than I gave them credit for.
Now I am uncertain about everything. Since what I thought was pronouced “vickshuals” is really pronounced “vittles,” does that mean the word “cement” is really pronounced “SEE-ment” as in “out back by the SEE-ment pond”?
I don’t know if that’s an accepted pronunciation, but I’ll often call an inground pool a See-ment pond just like that to see who picks up the reference.
Now victuals isn’t that commonly used anymore. They were pronouncing it correctly but the word itself seemed like southern/country/hill talk. I think maybe most people don’t know how it’s spelled when the word is spoken, or how it’s pronounced when written. And I’ve seen it spelled ‘vittles’ in writing once or twice escaping the notice of editors.
ETA: I’m glad I pointed that out about KarlGauss’ post. Thought I might be puttin’ on airs by assuming people didn’t realize the pronunciation.
I recall a restaurant in the Chicago suburbs that didn’t accept credit cards, BUT had an ATM machine on the premises. The owners probably thought this was a brilliant business decision – instead of paying a cut to those greedy credit card companies, let’s put in an ATM and MAKE MONEY every time our customers are forced to use it! – but it struck me as needlessly and desperately parsimonious.
The restaurant closed about a year ago, despite a makeover from the “Restaurant Impossible” TV show … and yes, the no-credit-cards policy was ridiculed (and reversed) by Robert Irvine and the RI crew.
I just remembered that my town used to have a restaurant right next door to a spay and neuter clinic (adjacent spaces in the same building). The restaurant is gone, the clinic has taken over the whole building.