Opuscula Of dried plums And other foods

SAY GOOD-BYE TO PRUNES AND RAISINS. Say hello to “dried plums” and “dried grapes.”

Images of commercially available dried fruits

PRUNES AND RAISINS have gone the way of actresses, hostess, and a few other words that are held in disrepute by some self-deluded language mavins.

Will “pickle” be the next victim? Will it become “pickled cucumber?” Perhaps “dilled (or maybe ‘dallied’) cuke”?

Jars of cucumbers being dilled into pickles

If the righteous insist on calling a spade a spade (even if it’s a shovel), perhaps “hot dog” ought to be called what it is: “something stuffed into animal intestine”?

Perhaps “hamburger”^{1, 2} should be renamed to “steerburger” since the ground beef is supposed to be ham free. (In some places, the “hamburger” is meat-free.)

I understand that “kosher style” means “not kosher at all.” A kosher style Ruben is not, cannot be, a kosher Ruben, not matter how “Jewish” the name may sound.³ (That is not to write that no one claiming to be Jewish ever ate a Ruben, but it still isn‘t kosher.)

Katz's Delicatessen Ruben³

Let’s change the names of several drinks, too.

After all, here is no “blood” in a Bloody Mary. No “Mary” either unless Mary is a bar maid who cut her finger slicing fruit to garnish drinks.

Did Tom Collins ever mix a Tom Collins? The Business Insider provides a bit of history on how the drink got its name.⁴

FRANKLY, SCARLET, I wish people would leave well enough along. Let a prune be a prune and a plum be a plum. A grape is no more a raisin that a pupa is a butterfly. Ditto cucumbers on their way to picklehood.

If anyone wants to drink a Tom Collins to wash down a kosher style Ruben, be my guest.

But PLEASE don’t call a prune a “dried plum” or a raisin a “dried grape.”

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Sources

1. Hamburger name: http://tinyurl.com/y88sb4x8

2. Hamburger steak: http://tinyurl.com/yboehazt

3. Ruben sandwich: http://tinyurl.com/pbn858w

4. Tom Collins: http://tinyurl.com/yczga28p

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Truth is an absolute defense to defamation. Defamation is a false statement of fact. If the statement was accurate, then by definition it wasn’t defamatory.

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