Perhaps. Although I’ve never had marinara that I considered hot spicy.
This would be a lot easier for you if your mother described spicy hot foods as “burny” like my mother did. As in, “I can’t finish this. It’s too burny.”
Like most other flavor terms, it’s a relative thing. A decent pumpkin pie is a bit spicier than a typical cheesecake, but not spicy in the scheme of things.
And you can’t handle her using “spicy” and “hot” in ways you don’t like?
Child, you can have no idea what “toxic” or “abusive”, not mention “communication” or “profoundly” mean if this is enough send you wall-crawling, so I don’t think you get final word on “spicy” and “hot”.
(We use the terms “hot hot” and “spicy hot” to distinguish between the two uses of “hot”, and “heavily spiced” to refer to non-hot spicy foods, like a good tomato sauce.)
Well done.
You haven’t had my wife’s spice cake. The heat-phobic Norskies at church enjoy the fresh, bright flavor of her baked goods, but haven’t a clue what makes them special.
And it has only been in the past few years that I’ve heard “spicy” to mean “hot” instead of “spicy.” I assumed the people who misused the word were sub-normal.
I’m beginning to suspect that it’s utterly impossible for family members to use/pronounce a word differently if asked to.
I mean, if I told ANY of my friends “Hey, that island over there is pronounced ‘Mackinaw’.” They’d say “Really? Oh, okay. Looks like Mackinaw’s getting some rain.”
But not my mom: “Well, I’ve been calling it MackiNACK all my life and you can’t expect me to change now. You should be nicer to old people. How can I remember to say things the way everyone else does, or not use the word ‘pickaninnies’ for those adorable little Negroes? Or whatever they want to be called now…”
My mother, raised in the early part of the previous century in rural Maine, thought boiled chicken, unseasoned, tasted just fine, and automatically halved the sugar or cinnamon or nutmeg in any cake or dessert recipe she encountered because of a deep plerophory that, no matter what it was, “it didn’t need all that.” If a dish had celery in it, that had enough black pepper flavor to suit her. She was a terrible cook with no palate whatsoever, and the only good result of her cooking was that she did it, every day, to feed her family, and inadvertantly raised her five children to have incredibly sensitive palates and low sodium levels. As she grew older her sense of taste dulled and she began to like sweets and even put salt on things, or maybe it was that she began to let go of the old religiously-based idea that enjoying anything was sinful. And at the end of her life, she began eating ice cream. For some reason, I am very grateful for that, and I wish she had had more.
Puttanesca usually has a kick to it, too. Plus, of course, you have hot spicy Italian sausages, salumis, cappacola, pasta fra diavolo, etc. (Some of these may be more Italian-American or Sicilian, but I’m sure the commercial is not referencing a specific regional Italian cuisine.)
This thread is taking me places I never dreamed.
Said the surprised flounder.
How would an elderly mother’s alleged misuse of the term “spicy” be part of the culture of abuse? I’m more interested in this psychological issue than the debate over terminology.
How does your mum use the term “savor”? Now that’s a word every red-blooded American should be fighting over!!
Like maybe, out of your delusion that you are The King of Words and they can only mean what you deem them to be?
Word to your mother!
You leave my promiscuous mother out of this.
Your mom goes to college.
“I’m washed in the blood of the savor!”
Life would be really really weird if it only took us to places we dreamt about.
She had the foresight to raise a pedantic schoolmarm of a son whom she’d be later able to drive nuts by not following his petty rules of grammar. It’s a diabolical plan a lifetime in the making.
Basically, she installed his buttons so that she can now push them.