Is there any doubt that BBQ is a pseudo acronym creted to phonetically match the Spanish word barbacoa? Which, of course, simply means a lot of different things to different people in different countries, but in the end always comes back to some variant of a gridiron on top of a fire used for grilling food. Where is the divisiveness in that?
The Berlin Wall was divisive, but it only stood for 28 years.
The things you can and particularly can NOT put in a paella can be very divisive in Spain, same for whether you make tortilla with or without onions. Weird, I know, because both are good.
And I always thought the expression came from a particularly nasty form of torture!
^^^ Yeah, barbecue was going to be my answer. There are regions across the American southeast that would almost literally be willing to go to war with one another over assertions of one style’s superiority over another. Vinegar? Mustard? Sauce or dry? Sweet? Smoky? Pork or beef? Chicken, yes or no? And on and on. This to me answers the “most divisive” attribute because it isn’t just an either-or split like ketchup on a hot dog, but a vast patchwork of deadly serious aficionados pooh-poohing anything but their own local preference.
My wife and I finally got to see Hamilton live on stage yesterday. Say whatever you want about it having been wildly overexposed and overpraised for a couple of years, or having been a faddish interest for people who wanted to be included in the cool new phenomenon — purely as a live piece of theater, it’s an absolutely amazing experience, just a wall-to-wall blast of performance energy.
But the guy behind us was wholly unconvinced. He thought it was one of the worst plays he’d ever seen, and made sure everyone around him knew it. Based on his endless whinging, he considered it worthless because the show looks at history as a clash of personalities instead of having the parties sit down for a sober debate of pure policy, and moreover the use of hiphop stylings to transform dry historical text into urgent and vital drama accessible to a modern audience is evidence, he said, that the people of today are too stupid to engage with plain history on its own terms. He was unrelenting on making these two points, but in the end the only case for which he was entirely persuasive was that he was a total prat.
A very good way to put it. To us Canadians (and I’m sure many Australians), many of whom have barbecues on their back decks or apartment balconies, barbecuing means "grilling up hamburgers, steaks, shrimp, and/or hot dogs. The southern American purist who tells us that we’re not barbecuing, but we’re instead grilling, will likely be met with a “STFU; I’m barbecuing” at best.
Yeah, in the UK, barbecue typically refers to the apparatus - which is usually open bars over a charcoal fire. I’d say most people are also aware of BBQ as a term for various sauces, marinades and coatings but i dont think anyone cares enough to fight about it.
Under . Why? Under makes it easier to tear off a piece with one hand. With over I find myself having to reach across with my other hand.
ETA. Then there are those infernal devices that one tends to find in public restrooms. The ones where the axis of the TP roll is perpendicular rather than parallel to the wall. Those are wrong in both orientations. At least over vs. under has a correct answer. With front or back they’re both wrong.
this is great not only because it is the obvious literal answer to the question (and the context which I assume you intended) but also because you can never build a fence, like most of the rest of the answers in this thread, without everyone else who is not building it telling you how you are doing it wrong.
Chilli is the one for me. I once joked that if I followed every “X NeVeR GoEs in ChIlLi!” rule, I’d be simmering a pot of air. And then someone would tell me, “Everyone knows real chilli is cooked under a vacuum!”
I’ve heard of people washing their chicken before cooking, but I’ve never seen it. To me, it seems like a bizarre thing to do. Do y’all wash any other meats? I certainly don’t.
Its a domain where practices are quite tightly bound within cultures and as a result, seems to catch a lot of people (on both sides) completely by surprise,and that surprise seems to be incredibly fertile ground for the impression ‘oh, well there’s something wrong with you’