So after years of getting all befuddled about kebabs I finally figured it out: what Americans call kebobs are (as we know if we think about it a bit) actually shish kebobs ... but kebAbs are a completely different thing. It's all in the vowels, which Shaz helpfully pointed out to me this weekend, I evidently have real trouble with in Australia. (For example, upon meeting a dog named "Nutmeg," I thought she was telling me the dog's name was "not Meg." To which I'd replied, "well, that narrows it down." Later on, though, I found it even more humorous when another friend got confused and called it Cinnamon. Which was the second funniest moment only to Giles attempting to sit on his chair and missing completely and ending up on the ground, which still makes me laugh perhaps a wee bit more than necessary. It was a good weekend, you see.)
But back to Australian vowels. They're conniving little creatures and really very tricky. I've elaborated at length on the issue of O (particularly of course in the length of the noOOooOOooo), but the a/u conundrum is a bit deceptive as well. For ages I was convinced my new friend was named Jazzie, which I took to be short for Jasmine, until someone called her Justine and Shaz insisted at length that her name was actually Justie. At least I think that's what she was saying.
We had quite a weekend of it, actually. While I found the Giles incident among the more hysterical, Shaz favored our conversation approaching Linda's place.
"Linda lives on Dick Street," Shaz said.
"So I've heard," I said. "I've never been to Dick Street."
"So I've heard," she said as we turned onto it.
"It's really rather small," I said truthfully.
And she said nothing more, because she was laughing too hard.
But back to kebabs. The reason, it seems, Australian kebabs are nothing like American kebobs is because they're not actually the same thing at all. Tricky little vowels like I said. It also explains why I was convinced everyone was pronouncing the word wrong. Turns out they weren't.
Oops.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
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2 comments:
Speaking of O's, I discovered from listening to some Mark Driscoll sermons that he says 'God' exactly the way an Aussie would say 'guard'. Once I focussed on it, it became disconcerting. All I could hear from then on was a sermon about 'Guard'.
If we were talking about the things on a skewer, we'd still call them kebabs or shish-kebabs. The problem with "kebab" or "kebob" is that we're all trying to find an English spelling for a Middle Eastern word that probably doesn't use our alphabet.
As a side note, Blogger's spell-checker is telling me that kebab is the correct spelling and kebob isn't.
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