Mr M is doing a bit of Italian through Duolingo (whilst I am doing my Irish) in lieu of our impending visit to Italy in December (all about that later) I can’t help but hear a few words here and there and they do get stuck in my memory. One of them is “Pomodoro” which mean “tomato”. On my way back home from work, I spotted this restaurant which I know is a chain in London (at the least) and it was called “Rossopomodoro”. Sounds very exotic isn’t. Now that I know what it literally translates to i.e., red tomato, it doesn’t sound so exotic anymore. Why would you want to name your restaurant “red tomato”? that is a bit odd isn’t? I am sure if we try and translate some of those exotically named restaurants to English, it would be quite funny. One such restaurant I remember in USA (?) is El Pollo Loco which literally translates to Crazy Chicken! đ Do you know of any such names?
Tag: names
some more rant on my name
Most of this week, I have been filling forms of one sort of the other and by today, Friday, I am officially tired of it. I don’t want to write my own name for a week in any paper. Grrrr!!! And if it is possible I don’t want to fill any forms, unless the ones I had filled does its purpose. I guess this is all part and parcel of moving to a new country and all…but I need a break! And when you have forms which have small space to write your name and that isn’t enough to fill your long name…another Grrrrr!!! moment. I think what my friend and his wife are doing is wise. They haven’t named their child (a boy) yet and he is already a couple of months short of his first birthday (auspicious times and all). By now he might as well name himself and that wouldn’t be a bad thing, even though I am not sure what name he would choose since he can hardly talk.
Those Quirky Ones
While doing the short city tour of Cork in our car, because it was raining outside and we had a flight to catch and had only an hour to ourselves to tour the city, I found some cute and quirky shop names. Here are the ones I ended up capturing on my phone.
There were one in Bandon (in the County of Cork) called ‘The Found Out Cafe’ which I thought was quite funny but didn’t get a picture of the same.
One item, many names
Brinjal… a species of the nightshade family, that which might cause itching for some, but is very rich in iron, is one of my favorite vegetables. Whenever possible I make sure I have sauteed brinjal. There have been various discussions about Bt brinjal and controversies and stuff, but let us not go to that topic. That is slightly boring.  If I say brinjal, how many of you really know which vegetable I am talking about? If you are one of those who can recognize it then I am very glad to hear it. Because whenever I visit the US, I have to correct myself and say eggplant over there. And if I happen to visit the UK, I should remember to use the word aubergine. I am not sure what other places has what names for this vegetable.  Why does a vegetable or fruit have so many names in so many places? How is one supposed to keep track?
It is the same with Zucchini and a Courgette. They are one and the same. Except that, they are different from cucumbers. I am not sure what the English Cucumber means, the ones I have seen in the stores here. They do look more like Zucchini, but well, what do I know.
Post for this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt.
Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: âegg.â Use it as a noun or a verb. Enjoy!
All about the names
In our community, it is a normal practice to use the grandfather’s name for the son’s and grandmother’s name for the daughter’s (the grandparent being the kid’s grandparents obviously). I was named after my grandmother (father’s mom) but then people younger than my grandmom can’t call me using her name (would seem rather disrespectful isn’t? Well, not in many other countries, but here, trust me, it is very disrespectful) so they had another name for unofficial purposes (aka to call me by that name at home, where my grandmom might be around) Later they combined both the names and now I am mostly known by my household name which sort of became my ‘name’ (both official and personal)
Keeping in with the tradition, my brother (who is named after my granddad) named his daughters the same way. The first one is named after my mom, and the second one named after my sister in law’s mom. Both short and sweet names. But at home, they are called using different names (which are also very short and sweet). And no, they haven’t combined both names to one. They don’t go that well together. Mine was the only exception. So today my brother went to book train tickets (for their annual vacation to my place) at the station (he found it was getting very tedious to do it online, so went to the station to get it done….took less time and less effort to get it done there). There he had to fill the form and in that, there were two names which were similar but the ages were quite different. One was 5 years old (first niece) and the other 65 years old (my mom). The person who was at the counter looked at my brother and goes like, ‘are you sure this is right?’ And took his sweet time to hear my brother’s explanation about the family names and such and finally was convinced and booked the tickets. I am sure the person who is gonna check their tickets is also going to have the same questions (or probably not, if he is having his granddad’s name for himself). And guess what, both of them got concession: one was underage (full tickets are assigned to people of age 6 and above), so only priced for half a ticket and the other was too old so, priced for half a ticket (being a senior citizen and all).
I have heard of people using the same names and adding suffixes like Jr, or Sr, etc., but what about in the case of women? If for example, you use the same name as your grandmom’s or mom’s? How do you differentiate when you talk about two women in a family having the same name. Haven’t heard of Sr or Jr associated with them. In our cases, we never assign Sr / Jr even to men, so it hardly matters and we do have two names for a single person.
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