Not that I frequent Dairy Queen. I’ve just seen a commercial for their new sandwich and they pronounced it ‘broo-shetta’. Now, Italian pronunciations vary by region, and ‘broo-shetta’ is pretty close to how it’s pronounced in some regional dialects; but not in Standard Italian. If they can’t pronounce it, I don’t know if I want to eat it.
[NB: I don’t actually speak Italian.]
It’s “broo-shetta” in English, like it or not. I’ve tried getting away with “broosketta” and most of the time, nobody knows what the fuck I’m talking about, even at Italian restaurants (where the servers might not be Italian, though.) So I just default to “brooshetta” to be understood. And the last place I expect to pronounce it in the Italian manner is DQ. (And DQ, depending on location, can be damned good.)
Of all the goddamned reasons I can come up with for not eating a chicken bruschetta at Dairy Queen (chicken bruschetta sounds like it’s missing the point of delicious bruschettaosity; it’s the wrong time of year for bruschetta; it’s kind of a faddish food likelier to be done poorly than well at this point; fast food bruschetta sounds sad; Dairy Queen’s savory food is kind of sad), their failure to pronounce an English word as though they’re speaking Italian from a particular dialect is near the bottom of my list. “Because it might contain arsenic put there by a sentient and vengeful cockroach” is right below it.
This reminds me that I saw some commercial that I may have completely imagined or perhaps it was all a dream. It was for some fast food place selling gyros, and it was either a worker teaching someone how to pronounce it or a dad telling his kid or something. They were saying “it’s called a gyro. You pronounce it like gyro”- like jai-row. I decided I would never shop at this imaginary fast food place, or the Gyro stand at the state fair where the guy asked me if I wanted a regular jai-row or a turkey jai-row and if I wanted jai-row sauce.
I will also boycott DQ because of the way they pronounce “caramel.”
More Blizzards and Dillybars for us, actualliberalnotoneofthose. 
When I order Yee-rows in Chicago the Greek behind the counter smirks at me and says it’s pronounced Jai-row. When I order Jai-rows in Chicago the Greek behind the counter smirks at me and says it’s pronounced Yee-Row.
Here in Brooklyn I order “Souvlaki” or “Doner” and the Egyptian or the Turk behind the counter hands it over silently and takes my money.
Fuck them Greeks.
I believe I’ve previously mentioned my wife’s encounter with “Chicken in Poulet Sauce” on a menu. One of my favorites was “Tossed Salad with Crudites”. :smack:
I thought Souvlaki was Greek. And at least here in Detroit it’s different than a gyro. Grilled cubes rather than shaved roasted loaf. Both damn good though,…
this thread may have fomented a change of dinner plans.
I think Johnny has exaggerated the amount of “brooshetta” being said in Italy.
Forget about dialects, it’s “broos-ketta” in Italian, period.
Anyway I’ve just looked up the DQ Chicken Bruschetta and I have to say I’m stumped.
Where I live, bruschetta is grilled bread brushed with garlic/oil and topped with one or two ingredients.
That thing from BQ is what is known as “a sandwich”.
Maybe a little. It’s been a very long time since I’ve been to Italy. But it seems that things are pronounced differently in the South. Like ‘pasta fazool’ for ‘pasta e fagioli’ and ‘gabba-gool’ for ‘capicola’ and ‘motza-rell’ for ‘mozzarella’… I’m wondering about ‘calzone’. I learned it as ‘cal-zone-eh’, but I hear it as ‘cal-zone’. Southern pronunciation?
Those are all Americanisations of an antique version of the Naples dialect - probably spoken by around 1% of the Italian population. There is also, in fact, a vowel of sorts at the end of all of those words even in that dialect (pasta fasuli versus standard Italian pasta e fagioli), but on transfer to the US the final vowel got obliterated. In other words it’s not pasta fazool in Naples either. I read a good article about it the other day, but can’t find it.
In America, “bruschetta” has come to mean chopped tomatoes and herbs in an Italian-dressing-ish vinaigrette, which might conceivably be served as a topping for garlic bread.
Jack in the Box had a bruschetta chicken sandwich about ten years ago when I worked there. It was pretty similar to the sandwich in question here.
Oh! That explains a lot - it doesn’t refer to the bread at all?
FWIW, I’ve never encountered bruschetta being anything but bread.
Pretty much, yes. If you were eating at an Italian-American restaurant and ordered a bruschetta appetizer, you’d most likely get garlic bread topped with tomatoes and herbs in vinaigrette, something like this. The trend has been towards using the word to mean the topping rather than the bread.
I never noticed it either, until today, at Aldi. They were selling “traditional bruschetta” and “garlic bruschetta” in a plastic tub. So, basically just the bruschetta topping. Something similar to this (from Aldi’s German website, so it doesn’t appear to be an American-only use of the word), except not in a glass jar, but plastic container, like you might get store-made salsa in.
I guess you better boycott Taco Bell because they don’t properly pronounce burrrrrrrrrrrrrriiiiiiiito.
A) American English doesn’t really have the trilled r sound.
B) I don’t eat at Taco Bell. (They have a new product, which I don’t remember the name of. When the commercial played I told the wife, ‘Guess where I’m not going to lunch tomorrow.’)
Naples and Sicily smashing together in Manhattan at the turn of the century produced the New York Italian dialect. My grandmother who was born in Italy complained when she visited Italy in her 70s that the Italians didn’t know how to speak Italian right.
That’s the point. American English doesn’t have to sound like Italian any more than it has to sound like Spanish.
The last time I ate cooked food at Dairy Queen was in 2004. I was in Raleigh on business, or in the outskirts anyway, and I was hungry and just wanted something quick. I got a burger combo at a DQ down the road.
I took one bite out of the burger, ate two fries, and promptly dropped the entire meal into the nearest garbage can.
So yeah, I’m not eager to see the new stuff either.
