That way madness lies. Especially when you’re talking about cabbage.
“Training is nothing…cauliflower is just cabbage with a college education.” – Mark Twain
One of Twain’s real quotes. Also, Cauliflower is yet another variant of Brassica oleracea
(It’s from Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894))
I just learned that Dairy Queen ‘soft serve’, is called that because it’s technically wrong to call it ice cream, as it lacks sufficient dairy proteins, I believe.
Close. Soft serve has a lower fat content than ice cream; it also doesn’t get frozen.
So is that what they used to call “ice milk” back in the olden days?
Freeze soft serve and you pretty much get ice milk, yeah.
When I worked at a McDonald’s 40 years ago, we were explicitly told to call them Shakes and not Milk Shakes because they were made from ice milk. Also the different sizes of fries were Regular, Medium and Large and not to use the word Small.
Ice milk is an obsolete term for “low-fat” or “reduced-fat” ice creams with less than 10% milkfat. Soft serve would be low-fat ice cream with air pumped in. I don’t think that has a separate definition today, but my copy of the Code of Federal Regulations defining dairy terms is sadly out of date. True story.
I thought this was a rather recent invention (I’ve noticed it being used a lot at pizza places), along with various service tiers labeled (or advertised as) Good, Better, Best. Interesting that such a concept was used 40 years ago. I guess I just didn’t notice until recently.
the funny thing is everyone on the editorial side of ST said lucy didn’t or pretended she didn’t understand almost anything about the show. other than it was on a spaceship and spaceships were popular on tv
Some people thought it was her acting that way so paramount wouldn’t hassle her and them over the scripts of the show too much
Mustard greens are just as good as collards!
I probably wouldn’t have noticed either if I hadn’t gone through McDonald’s training in 1980. It was heavily emphasized.
I once went thru a McD’s, and for the beverage I wanted all they sold were medium and large. Htf can it be a medium?
I worked at Burger King in the late 80’s and management seemed to have a strange fetish about not using the word small. Fries and drinks all started at regular.
Avoiding the word “small” has led the dilution of coffee to unbearable levels: it has become watery and insipid. You need more than small, actually, you also need tiny! Just as sometimes an espresso is not enough and you crave for a ristretto. I can’t make that at home, now I have to go out.
But not without pointing out first that the systematics of Brassica oleracea varieties is one possible approximation of infinity. I would not recommend tackling that without a lot of idle time.
I’m betting it’s because calling it “small” would lead to a lot of customers complaining that it’s priced too high because, after all, it’s a “small” serving. Calling it “regular” makes them think there’s a standard serving size and this is it, so they don’t see the price as too high.
I think. Not a marketing specialist or a psychologist/psychiatrist.
I could be way off base here, but I always assumed that the omission of an officially designated small size was that it might be thought of as inferior in some way. This is, after all, the same industry that has given us Big Macs and Whoppers and supersized orders of fries and whatnot, amid much ballyhoo and marketing hype. I’m pretty sure that many (maybe most) of us who were around when the ad campaign was in full swing can still sing the “two all-beef patties…” jingle that rattles off the ingredients of the Big Mac, which emphasizes that you’re getting a lot of stuff on that burger.
They had trained us to think that small just isn’t up to the job.
TIL the reason why in typography capital letters are called “upper case” and non-capitals are called “lower case.” In the early days of printing, individual letters were cast on small metal blocks to be assembled together for words. The terms refer to their bin locations. The capital letters were kept in the upper case while the non-capitals were kept in the lower case.
Which brings us back to the word “small” which is the correct term for non-capital letters in handwriting. Technically, “lowercase” and “uppercase” only apply to typeface.
Well of course. That’s how the 20 year old manager explained it to me when I was 16. It’s basic marketing.
On a similar subject, a few years later a good friend of mine worked at Sea World. She was given a list of words never to be used such as: cage, tank, capture…
Grump. No. Words evolve. It absolutely doesn’t matter how they were used originally.
adjective
(of an alphabetical letter) of a particular form often different from and smaller than its corresponding capital letter, and occurring after the initial letter of a proper name, of the first word in a sentence, etc. Examples: a, b, q, r.
Printing. pertaining to or belonging in the lower case.Compare case2 (def. 8).
verb (used with object), low·er·cased, low·er·cas·ing.
- to print or write with a lowercase letter or letters.