I love words and I enjoy studying where they came from. There's a word for that: etymology. We could discuss the etymology of the word "etymology" for days on end, and wind up exhausted.
One of the places we can find out about words is a dictionary. I love them and I will often just pick one up at random and thumb through it, looking for new words, or words new to me.
However, I realize that there are good dictionaries and bad dictionaries, just as there are good and bad hamburgers, hammers, and hammocks. And without spending a lot of time reading a dictionary that might not be all that good ("Webster's" is good, "Stan Webster's" is probably not) how are we to know?
I came up with a simple test. I flip to the "e" section and look for the word "eleemosynary." It means relating to charity.
Substandard dictionaries exclude words such as this because they are not part of the daily lexicon for most of us, but they still should be in the dictionary in case someone wants to look it up.
I don't know, I just think it's easier to have yardsticks by which to measure. And I bring all this up because I read that churlish chef Gordon Ramsay always orders a crab cake to size up a restaurant's quality.
The answer, as reported on Quora, is "By choosing to have crab cakes, Gordon can not only judge the cooking ability of the kitchen staff, but he can also taste whether they’re using fresh ingredients or blitzing a frozen cake in the microwave (as the latter kills the texture)."
"In a few cases the smell of the crab cakes was so horrendous, he was even able to tell the restaurant served expired ingredients and did a bad job at storing the food they had…"
I'm writing to you from Baltimore, MD, USA, Crab Cake capitol of the world, where everyone still has, and treasures, their family crab cake recipe. We know if you're trying to slip us a fakeroo around here, so that's good for cranky Gordon to use as a test.
Knowing whether a restaurant serves good crab cakes is a gift. It's very...eleemosynary.
1 comment:
Some people are snobs. Others are inverted snobs. I find that I am a convoluted snob -- I read highbrow journals but take pride in not recognizing the names of literary luminaries published therein. I am guilty of reading above my brow. I bring this up because, when I read them, I harvest words I don't know; "eleemosynary" was one of them. Next to it in my list is "adamantine." Meaning incorruptible or unbreakable, it's from the Latin adamantius, meaning diamond or diamond-like. And here I was thinking it that it meant of or pertaining to the glam-rocker whose name it embeds.
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