Saucyman: A Word from the Kitchen

Friday, June 13, 2008

A Word from the Kitchen - Pickle

A peck of pickles is 8 quarts, dry measure; as opposed to 8 quart jars of pickles. The word pickle, is the subject of this installment of A Word from the Kitchen.

Pickle

Pickle is a noun and is synonymous with brine (more on that later). Pickle is also a noun referring to the perishable goods that come out of the pickle. It’s a mess back there. Pickle has a confusing history with an unknown origin. Some say it is Scottish and stems for a word meaning trifle. Its bewildering past is partly due to the fact that all cultures pickle and have pickled. Here are just a few spellings on the long road pickle has taken to the present: peklle, pykyl, pikkyll, pyccle, pigell. The different spellings can be used as a map to chart and understand how pickle has come from many different places in many different times. Not only has everyone pickled, but traditionally, they pickled together. It was a harvest time activity, like wine-making.

Now, about brine, one could argue that a pickle, a solution of vinegar for preserving foods is profoundly different than brine, which is a solution saturated with salt. And one would be right to split hairs, but in everyday usage the terms seem to share the same ground. Language, in its enormity, lives quickly and beyond control. Dictionaries are graveyards. Words are locked and pinned to their thin pages like prized wings in a lepidopterist’s glass case. You can’t actually go to a dictionary for answers. If you want to know something, you have to ask the people talking. In the kitchen, arguing about language is like arguing with the night.

-Carl Adamshick

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Basketball

Since the lockout ended, I have been largely silent about the great sport of basketball. Despite Brandon Roy retiring, despite my beloved Blazer’s sprint out of the blocks to a really good start, despite my home team playing a style of basketball than can no longer be described as Van Gundying (Jeff) up the sport’s fluidity.

I don’t know, some interesting developments transpired: During the lockout, analysts and beat writers, the very people who possibly think about professional basketball more than I do, had a light bulb go on over their collective heads and across the league they discovered what everyone else pretty much already knew, NBA Commissioner David Stern is a dick. Over the last decade Stern forced bankrupt municipalities to build new stadiums for billionaires’ new play thing, this heavy handed behavior garnered nothing but praise. The writers sighed and thought eh, “we live in the suburbs, we write for suburban middle managers, our values are if anything anti-urban” - with all the weight that word carries. But needlessly locking out players jeopardizing their tenuous employment in publishing, well that is something that we might complain about except they hate the players more - Oh the conflict.

But mostly I can’t get excited about any team helmed by Nate McMillan. We’ll make the playoffs with a pretty good but not best record, maybe get home court advantage in the first round and then fail to advance. This is true until McMillan proves otherwise, 11 years a coach out of the first round once - this record while coaching some pretty good but not great teams. Along the way Nate will overplay star forwards LaMarcus Aldridge and Gerald Wallace so there is nothing in the tank come playoff time and risk their health. And yo-yo Nicholas Batum’s minutes so the young player becomes a head case instead of developing into a consistent contributor.

So a predictable finish is part of the my own jejune response to the return of the sport of kings (not really, that's horse racing) maybe it's the sweet science (damnit google says that's boxing). My attitude goes deeper than a finish more predictable than one of McMillan's earth toned, triple pleated suits, if the lockout exposed a fault line in NBA coverage it's that broadcasters and writers are now PR agents for the teams - so who is left to advocate for the fan - thank goodness for blogs and the posting cyborg that is named Henry Abbott.

2nd round or bust