What’s In A Name?
Thursday, December 7th, 2006
After a grueling 3 weeks of frantic study, stpm is now over! I can hear the birds chirping, I can see the rainbow just over KOMTAR, or maybe I’m just hallucinating after being in the pressure pot for months! Ha ha!
Anyhow, I’ll just get on to my article…
Names, we give them to everything, cars, food, people… In fact everything that is known is given a name. It helps us to identify things with ease, allowing us humans to speak on the same wave length so to speak. For example, one does not have to go to a painful ordeal of describing 2 blades with handles attached together by an axis just to get a scissors! Yes, that would be quite fuss. However, it is also interesting to note that how naming can in fact alter the way we look at things, which comes to my point.
Instead of trying to explain it, it is more appropriate to show with a simple example. If I were to say “fish eggs” most would look at me with disgust, the picture of a slimy gooey mass would form in your mind. However, if I were to say caviar, now that would be different no? Its funny how we just by slapping a new name to it, fish eggs suddenly becomes a food for the rich wealthy and famous when the fact is, it’s still fish eggs. Goose liver is dirt cheap here in the market, but walk into a French restaurant and order foie grass, and boy do the prices really rise up! Just by placing in a flashy name in place of the old one and poof, it’s a “delicacy”, reserved to the rich and famous!
“Milt, (especially from salmon, blowfish and crabs) is a delicacy in most countries.” Let me rephrase that, “Sperm, (especially from salmon, blowfish and crabs) is a delicacy in most countries.” Uh huh, you know that stuff from the crab, the creamy stuff you find after you remove the upper shell? Yup, that’s no cream cheese…
Why is it that we eat a beef burger and not a cow burger? Lamb is called mutton, pig is called pork. I tell you why, the minute I mention pig chop, a gross disgusting image of an animal that eats anything (even s–t!) pops up to your head, losing all sense of appetite. Or, imagine a lamb so cute like in those nursery rhymes you heard so much about, now imagine slashing it’s throat, skinning it, chopping it up, and then grilling it, yum yum…The naming is done so that we do not associate the animals with the food we eat, or else McD will go broke, ha ha. Can you look at a cow and salivate? I don’t think so.
Perhaps the most popular form of naming is fancy names concocted by marketing geniuses to drain all your money. Starbucks, my favourite example, gives ridiculous names to the sizes of their coffee, tall (How tall is small? Strange…), grande (Medium is grand? Wow…) and venti (Means twenty, twenty bucks coffee perhaps?). All those jargons actually make Starbucks feel really exquisite, but seriously, it just small, medium and large. And don’t even get me started on the types of coffee, Latte is actually coffee with milk, cappuccino is coffee with chocolate and blah blah blah… I mean, come on, do you seriously have to stamp every slight variation of a simple cup of coffee with a name? It’s just plain stupid!!! To sum it up, here’s a neat line from Tom Hanks from “You’ve Got Mail”: “The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee. Short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat, etc. So people who don’t know what the hell they’re doing or who on earth they are, can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self: Tall! Decaf! Cappuccino!”
After all that, perhaps I’ll go get a Kopi Peng at the coffee shop (That’s Frappe to you Starbuck-ers!). Oh and here’s a delicacy that you (err…me?No thanks!) may like to try, someday: Prairie oysters!
…and mind you, they don’t look like oysters!
Lol
