bunsen_h

Recent events hereabouts have reminded me of an old comedy sketch by Ronnie Barker, of the Two Ronnies:



The Two Ronnies was not exactly known for highbrow humour — they leaned more towards vaudevillian, variety-show stuff with a certain amount of satire.  But there's a line there: "Diagnosis is very like diarrhoea only you get it in your gnosis instead of in your rhoea."  And the pronunciation is precise; there's no question that he's saying "gnosis".

And too often, lately, we've been finding that a diagnosis does indeed involve "knowledge" coming out as an uncontrolled spew of feculent sludge.
 

There's a new CBC Radio program, "Type A".  Not about blood, unfortunately; it seems to be mostly about annoying pushy people.

Every time I hear the show's name, what I hear is "Taipei".
 

I have a serious allergy to sesame.  (Mostly, it seems, to the seeds rather than to the oil; as with many allergies, it's the proteins that cause the problem.)  I'm careful to check ingredient lists for sesame, and also for tahini (which is just sesame paste).


A few weeks ago, I bought a stack of heat-and-serve Indian food packets.  At 300g apiece, one of them makes a decent meal when combined with pasta or rice.  They're convenient to bring along to places where I can't get a good meal at a reasonable price, such as visiting a friend in the hospital, and have good flavour and reasonable nutritional value.  They're not very expensive, usually between $1.50 and $2, and have an unrefrigerated shelf life of a year or two.  And though sesame doesn't seem to be used much in Indian cookery (according to staff at Indian restaurants I've been to), I did check the ingredients before I bought them.


This evening, I was heating up the contents of a packet of a pineapple sweet and sour curry in the microwave oven.  Sounded yummy; I'd been looking forward to trying that one.  While I was waiting for the food to finish heating, for lack of anything else to read (and needing to be reading something, as usual), I was looking over the food package again.  And the word "sesame" caught my eye in the French ingredients list... as in, "Graines de sesame hydrogenee", between "Piment rouge" and "Moutarde".  I went back to the English version: "Red chilli, Gingelly, Mustard".  Then the German version: "Cayennepfeffer, Til, Senf".


It never occurred to me that "gingelly" wasn't... well, just some kind of spice I'd never heard of.  I thought it might be a misspelling of "galingale".  If anything, it reminds me of Allan McFee and "Mom Nifkin's jellied gin".  Who knew that it meant sesame?  Apart from everyone who speaks... Hindi, I suppose.


That "hydrogenated sesame seeds" in French just sounds weird.  But I don't know if they mean the oil instead of the seed, or if there was some other kind of translating error.  I decided that it wasn't safe for me to eat that dish — sure, a hospital is the best place to be when you're having an anaphylactic attack, but really, it's better just not to go there.  Instead, I got an overpriced slice of wilted substandard vegetarian pizza from the cafeteria and picked out as much of the onion and olives as I could.


Now I think I need to find all the possible translations of "sesame" in current use, so I can be more careful to avoid them.  I learned two more this evening: "gingelly" (and several spelling variants) and "til".  (I note that my German dictionary translates "sesame" to "Indischer Sesam", i.e., "Indian sesame", which is doubly weird.)

 

When someone, in conversation, refers to "my current [partner]", does this suggest a pattern of short-term relationships?

I don't think that a Thurber allusion was intended.