In Indiana, a dish-to-pass supper is another term for a pot-luck supper or a covered-dish supper. A related regional label is the pitch-in supper, where everyone contributes a dish. Checking Wikipedia’s potluck article for more synonyms turned up nosh-you-want, but that term had no independent life in Google Books, news archives, or elsewhere in print. Every use tracked back to the Wikipedia page itself, so the specious term has been edited out of the entry. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “A “Dish-to-Pass Supper” Is a Communal Potluck-Style Meal”
We’ve talked about pitch-ins on this show.
Yep.
These are the potluck suppers that they hold in Indiana, right?
Right.
It’s a term only in Indiana.
Pitch-in suppers, yes.
And we’ve talked about potlucks.
Yep.
Right?
This is where everyone brings a dish.
There are other terms for this, covered dish supper and covered dish meal.
And this is one that I didn’t know, but dish to pass supper.
Dish to pass?
It’s a hyphenated dish hyphen T-O hyphen pass.
Where’s that?
Various places all around the country.
It doesn’t seem to be regional.
I’ve never heard of that.
But, you know, I went to Wikipedia just to see what they had on this, and Wikipedia let me down, and I just wanted to say once again.
Well, Wikipedia is better than it used to be, and sometimes it’s reliable, and sometimes you get lucky, and they nail it.
But somebody had put in there a term, supposedly, for this kind of meal where everyone brings a dish and shares, Nosh you want.
N-O-S-H hyphen, the letter U hyphen want.
And I’m like, oh, I didn’t know that.
And so I Googled it.
Oh.
Not in Google Books anywhere.
I looked in Google News Archive, which has trillions of words across more than 150 years.
Not anywhere in there.
I looked on the bare internet.
And all of the uses I found of Nosh you want were all either taken from the Wikipedia article or referring to the Wikipedia article.
I found that kind of surreptitious vandalism in Wikipedia where they don’t put a dirty word, but they put patently fake information that could be real.
And I’m just issuing this kind of like warning to you.
Always double check Wikipedia or any source, no matter if it’s a book or a friend’s letter or an expert.
Always double check your data.
That’s a great example.
I’m so glad that I did.
So I made the edit to the Wikipedia page.
It’s no longer in there and hopefully nobody will add it back in.
So it’s kind of like a Mount Weasel.
A little bit, yeah. These are the surreptitious terms that people throw in there to catch up copyright thieves.
In dictionaries, yeah.
If you found some data that needed to be double-checked, we’d like to hear about it.
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