You should hear how she says "prosciutto"...

Does anyone ever watch “Everyday Italian” on the Food Network? I watch it now and then, because Giada De Laurentiis (the host of the show) has some good ideas sometimes, and I like to experiment when I cook. Which tends to scare Rick, especially when he asks “what’s for dinner?” and I say I have no idea. Even when I have a counter full of ingredients in front of me… usually if I just start throwing stuff together, eventually something good will result. And in my defense, I can only recall ONE time that I really screwed up a dinner… I added too much soy sauce to a stir fry. I hadn’t realized how much SALT is in that stuff… (And hey, I know NOW… that was the last time I screwed up a stir fry…)

So I do watch this show sometimes, but I find Giada relentlessly annoying. She has this rather pretentious way of pronouncing the Italian words she uses. Granted, she WAS born in Rome, according to her foodtv.com bio, so I assume she speaks fluent Italian. Which is great… but she’s also very obviously been in America for a while, and speaks fluent English without a hint of an Italian accent. Except, as I mentioned, when she jumps all over one of those Italian words. Like today, she was cooking spaghetti with a pinot grigio sauce. Okay, it’s spaghetti… we’ve all had spaghetti, we all know how to SAY “spaghetti,” and I think it’s safe to say that spaghetti – Italian as it may be – is quite the American staple. Which makes it sound really bizarre when the on-air chef is talking about boiling the water for the “spaaah-gheeeteee.” Huh? The what?? It’s as if she feels it’s necessary to enlighten us with a little Italian lesson between the appetizer and the main course.

What’s curious is that while she was rolling sun-dried tomatoes and “moootzerrrrrelllah” into phyllo dough, she mentioned that they looked like burritos – and just plain old American-sounding “burritos.” Not buuurrrrreeetohs.” So the Italian words necessitate proper linguistic pronunciation, but the Spanish words don’t? The Italian language and the Spanish language seem to have a lot of similarities, so it shouldn’t be much of a challenge to pronounce “burrito” like a fluent Spanish-speaker would… especially if you’re already teaching us dummified Americans how to say “spaghetti” and “gelato” and “bruschetta.”

Which brings me to another topic – I have to admit that Faisal’s new made-up word is actually beginning to grow on me. I’ll never like “comfortability,” just because it’s a pointless (so-called) word. There’s no reason to use “comfortability” when you can just use “comfort.” But I’m realizing that “dummification,” on the other hand, may actually serve a purpose. I mean, if you’re making someone smarter, you might be “educating” them, or “teaching” them, or “enlightening” them. But what is the opposite of educate? What are you doing if you’re actually detracting from someone’s education? Might you, in fact, be dummifying them? Perhaps you are… yes, perhaps you are…

We ate lunch with mom and dad today, and while we were out, everyone was trying to make up as many words as possible. Most of them have escaped my mind at this point (I guess they weren’t as useful as “dummification”) but the best one was “lemonize.” That’s what Rick said he had to do to his iced tea to make it taste better. So you can lemonize tea, or water, or you could probably lemonize fish or chicken, too. Mom even likes to lemonize her Coke…

I wonder how you say lemon in Italian? Guess I’ll have to keep watching the Food Network…