If you’ve never dined on funistrada, braised trake, or buttered ermal, you’re not missing out, nor are you alone. All of those are made-up food names that were part of a 1972 survey given to thousands of members of the U.S. military to determine their food preferences. These three names were part of a list of 378 real food names; the fake were just in there to test whether the servicemembers were paying attention. Most responded that they’d never heard of those three, but a few said they had, and in fact ranked funistrada preferable to lima beans. The names sound somewhat plausible, though, which recalls studies of the bouba-kiki effect, which refers to the way people tend to associate certain sounds with certain ideas. In the case of the bouba-kiki effect, they associated the nonsense word bouba with round, curvy shapes and the nonsense word kiki with more pointed, spiky shapes. This is part of a complete episode.
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...
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