Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Think...Please!



This is not your grandmother's pasta.  
Bored with the usual spaghetti? Think: crunchy!  
Swap out spaghetti for celery sticks.  Substitute garlic with library paste. 

When I saw that the NY Times had caved in on the use of "swap out" in the same issue in which they used "flaunt" instead of "flout," I knew that the world was going to hell in an even faster handbasket than I had thought possible.  "Substitute with" is equally awful.  There's worse, though.

Second-most annoying is  the breathless, silly "Think."  Thirsty?  Think: Water!  Hungry?  Think: Food!  Whoever came up with that should be allowed to read nothing but  Dick and Jane for the rest of her (and I'll bet my last clove of garlic that it's a her, too) life, because that is the intellectual level of this inane phrase.

And, lastly, "This is not your hoary old ancestor's _____."  Yes, everything that came before was bad.  Filled with glass shards.  Dusty.  Raw.  I even learned from a breathlessVictoria Blashford-Snell (yes, everything in Wodehouse is absolutely true), via the Independent, that ten years ago no one had heard of canapes.  I guess I'm going to have to toss my 1940 edition of James' Beard's H'ors d'Oeuvres and Canapes right out the window and into a puddle.
Think:  Ridiculous.

2 comments:

Scott Reiner said...

this month's vanity fair has hitchens writing a piece about wodehouse - books on tape. sorry...

Barbara L. Hanson said...

What? Wodehouse lives and thrives. Whether it's film--the wonderful Fry and Laurie--or audio books. Sorry? I'm glad that more people are exposed to the wonderful Plum.

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I'm a ninth-generation Brooklyn native living in Manhattan.