help: semantic nightmare is ruining my day

[Aimlesswhinemouse]

DP and I have real communication problems and sometimes it surrounds everyday words. I know this sounds trivial but, just to take an example that cause a major row last night...whenever I cook a quiche for a dinner party or picnic DP always refer to it as a ?flan?.

I've corrected his mistake lots of times (there are loads of other examples!!!!!!) - but he has consistently failed to take notice of my correction, continually referring to quiches as flans and using the two words as if they were interchangeable.

I am finding his insensitivity to linguistic nuance increasingly depressing and I feeling increasingly distant from him. I just don?t know how much longer I can go on listening to him keep referring to a quiche as a flan. I'm sure this must be a symptom of deeper problems, but I'm just going out of my mind and feel so confused right now.

I call them hanging bar skays.

But then I've also been known to order Moway.

Flan sounds like it would taste bad... like flannel or flat...
I hate the way my Mum (and plenty of other people) say 'meal' as in go out 'for a meal' and then I just think of the stuff farm animals eat, it sounds dirty. It makes me so ick-feeling that I don't want to eat the food so I can get where you are coming from. But I also know that this is quite mad and unreasonable of me. You need to start finding this stuff funny and calm down! If you can't then, well, you are probably correct in thinking that this isn't just about a word.

I confess to having believed Moet should be pronounced Moway, but at least I know that coup de grace is pronounced coo de grass, not coo de grar - that one always makes me shudder. (Just because it's French doesn't always mean you leave the last consonant off!) And I've never yet called latte lar-tay.

Hanging baskets? wtaf? Sounds like some props for an execution.

No, no Rude - meal is a horrible word. It sounds mealey and cat bum mouthed.

You go out for dinner or lunch. Not a meal. I'm utterly with you on that one.

Back to flans - flan alludes to something egg-based. Like the Spanish flan - which is like creme caramel stuff, or Breton far. Both of these are sweet, but it isn't the sweetness that marks out a flan - it's the baked egg custard. Like what you get in a bloody quiche.

I still think it's a class issue.

Thanks Jenai, didn't know if I'd over-shared there...

"Meal Deal"

REL - perhaps you could just pop out for a bite instead then?

I misread title as semetic nightmare and wondered what dreams of Jewish men you were having

You think you have problems? My ex, and it pains me to even think of this, used to pronounce the s in Grosvenor. He was dead serious as well, he actually thought it was pronounced like that. So now he's my ex and I'm in therapy and, well, just get out now OP, escape while you can.

Food historian and pedant here. In English, a flan is an open tart filled with custard which may be cooked before or after the custard goes into the pastry, and may be sweet or savoury. There are medieval recipes pre-dating the borrowing of 'quiche' by centuries. In Spanish cuisine, 'flan' refers to the custard whether or not it is in the pastry case. A 'quiche' (French) is a savoury flan in which the custard is baked in the pastry shell. Both 'quiche' and 'flan' are nouns, and you are arguing about the definitions of words, not 'semantics.'

But leave the bastard, obviously.

Is a custard pies, as flung by clowns, a tart or a flan? And do French clowns fling quiches?

They are pies in this house, because "real men don't eat quiche" and he wouldn't know what a flan was if it smacked him in the nose lol

Can kind of understand where you're coming from OP. DH does this all the time although not over flans or quiches :)
Two examples, I hate him leaving his gym bag on the dining room floor because it stinks. I don't understand why he can't just put it in the cupboard, (all of 2 feet away) so I'll say "why have you dumped your gym bag on the floor again?!". His answer is, "I didn't dump it on the floor, I placed it there."
Me: "I'm trying to talk to you, do you have to be speaking to someone else on Facebook? It's rude."
DH: "Errr I'm not actually physically talking to them."

I'm not a violent person but honestly I could slice his tongue off when he starts that crap. He thinks he's being clever, I think he's being a tit lol.

Rude, Jeff
Perhaps if we weren't terribly hungry we could pop out for a lite bite

my dp says agsorb instead of absorb, but he is great at oral sex so I let him off

At times like this it is always a comfort to refer to Elizabeth David. In her book, French Provincial Cooking, the inhabitants of that region regard Quiche Lorraine simply as a savoury custard pie with eggs, cream, smoked bacon sans cheese.

how can i break my FIL's habit of saying 'beet root' and not bee-troot. It drives me nuts. I can't take the pain any longer. Thank god i've never made him a quich

Bee-troot? It is beet-root, surely?

Jenai , Jeff thats just about finished me off. Might just manage an apple and a glass of water for dinner.... even that seems a stretch

My DH has a habit, when preparing to leave the house, of saying 'where are my feet?'. It doesn't matter how many times DD or I say 'on the end of your legs ', he just doesn't seem able to say shoes.

He doesn't say 'please turn the light on', he says 'full vision'.

There are more of these idio(t)syncrasies. I have no idea why.

On the veracity of Wikipedia: the entry for our village used to say it was famous 'for a small herd of bison that were nearly all killed off by DEFRA during the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak, only to be saved by local villagers taking turns to chain themselves to the grateful beasts' - and for its Swiss bank.

REL - I'm safe assuming your favourite Dickens character name isn't 'Mealy Potatoes' (so called for his unfortunate complexion) then?

Repeat after me: "we are going out for a bi-tweet".

There, that's better.

And its BEE - TROOT ffs. Obviously.

I despair for the future of the English Language sometimes

Or if you're from certain parts of the South East, it's bee'roo'.

Obviously it is Beet Root - as it's a beet and a root. Nothing to do with bees or troots, whetaver they may be. My head hurts