You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Cat, Cocktails, Translations

Don't know where the page is really at? It's a scratchy cat, a scratchy cat, here's a Scratchy Cat.

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I'm quite enjoying reading The Bartender's Guide to Cocktails & Mixed Drinks, by Stuart Walton. It's written with a very distinctive voice, and the first third of the book is taken up with descriptions of the origin and source of most common spirits and liqueurs. For example, I didn't realize that vodka wasn't used in any of the classic cocktails, and didn't become widely consumed in the Western world until the 1950s, when it became the rebellious drink of choice (because of it's association with Soviet Russia). And how about this description of Cynar:

"A liqueur for the truly intrepid, Cynar is a soupy, dark brown potion made in Italy, the flavouring of which is artichoke leaves (its name dervies from the Latin word for artichoke, cynarum). It contains all the savoury bitterness of the globe artichoke, which is boldly illustrated on its label. If that sounds like fun, go ahead and try it. I once swallowed a modest measure of it in a little backstreet bar in Venice, and of all my shimmering memories of the watery city, Cynar is not, I have to say, the loveliest."

Or from the recipe for the Slow Comfortable Screw (so called because it's a Screwdriver (vodka and orange) plus sloe gin and southern comfort):

"The 1970s idea of a joke in the drink's name may be a touch embarrassing now, but the mixture is a good one, and the drink was something of a modern classic a generation ago. [...] Garnish with a cocktail cherry on a stick for that essential seventies touch, and add two long straws. A plastic novelty will add that final note of sheer class, as will throwing back three of them and then slow-dancing with somebody ghastly."

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Someone at work wanted a translation into Latin of "I choose love". Someone pointed at this translation site, which is actually pretty impressive, but suffers pretty badly from the "Invisible Maniac" problem (a famous machine mis-translation of "Out of sight, out of mind" when going to Russian and back). I was able to find a fairly good Latin dictionary and grammar aid; but I was only able to get most of the way with my dim memories of fifth-form Latin, and had to rely on the inestimable Sok to get the rest of the way.

This reminded me of a Engrish menu that someone pointed to recently, which had a really interesting comment attached to it:

"Take #1313, "Benumbed hot vegetables fries fuck silk." It should read "Hot and spicy garlic greens stir-fried with shredded dried tofu." However, the mangled version above is not as mangled as it seems: it's a literal word-by-word translation, with some cases where the translator chose the wrong one of two meanings of a word:

"First two characters: "ma la" meaning hot and spicy, but literally "numbingly spicy" -- it means a kind of Sichuan spice that mixes chilies with Sichuan peppercorn or prickly ash. The latter tends to numb the mouth. "Benumbed hot" is a decent, if ungrammatical, literal translation.

"Next two: "jiu cai," the top greens of a fragrant-flowering garlic. There's no good English translation, so "vegetables" is just fine.

"Next one: "chao," meaning stir-fried, quite reasonably rendered as "fries" (should be "fried," but that's a distinction English makes and Chinese doesn't).

"Finally: "gan si" meaning shredded dried tofu, but literally translated as "dry silk." The problem here is that the word "gan" means both "to dry" and "to do," and the latter meaning has come to mean "to fuck." Unfortunately, the recent proliferation of Colloquial English dictionaries in China means people choose the vulgar translation way too often, on the grounds that it's colloquial. Last summer I was in a spiffy modern supermarket in Taiyuan whose dried-foods aisle was helpfully labeled "Assorted Fuck." The word "si" meaning "silk floss" is used in cooking to refer to anything that's been julienned -- very thin pommes frites are sold as "potato silk," for instance. The fact that it's tofu is just understood (sheets of dried tofu shredded into julienne) -- if it were dried anything else it would say so."

And later, someone points out that "cowboy" is "veal" -- "boy cow", see?

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Okay, I've got most of my Primetime Adventures thing written, but I'm not going to get any time to finish it before the weekend. So I figure I'll post what I have now. Sorry, the one or two people who are interested! :)

Posted by svend at March 31, 2006 6:17 PM