Word of the Day

Mar. 26, 2008 (Day 60) Misnomer: a misnaming I was trying to figure out last night how to use up the buttermilk I had left over from making Irish soda bread last week. My first thought was buttermilk pie, but I didn't feel like making pie crust. And then I thought of buttermilk pancakes. I found a recipe online and saved it for later.I woke up this morning and pulled my laptop into my kitchen so I could retrieve the recipe and have some yummy pancakes for breakfast (I love having a laptop and wireless for this reason--no more printing recipes!). My browser loads my Google page as my homepage, so I was greeted with the WotD before I went to retrieve my recipe and open another tab with Pandora for some tunes while I cooked."Great," I thought. "How the heck do you photograph a misnaming?" As I mixed up my batter, I blearily thought over the word (precoffee) before it occurred to me that "buttermilk" was a misnomer. There's no butter in buttermilk. Why do we call it that?In fact, when I was looking into making my soda bread, I didn't have any buttermilk on hand so I looked for substitutions. The solution being "coddled" milk: you take a cup of milk and add a tablespoon of white vinegar or lemon juice to it and let it sit for 15 minutes until it gets lumpy. Yummmmm.I'd always heard of coddled eggs in a joking sense, and the term "coddled" for handling someone with kid gloves--spoiling, per se--but I never bothered to look up what it meant as a process. I was content having a vague, disgusted feeling whenever I heard "coddled eggs." Now that I've found out how to coddle milk, I really don't want to know how to coddle eggs. I will not look it up. Slightly-less-vague impression of disgust will do.

Mar. 25, 2008 (Day 59) Repine: to feel or express discontent If it seems like this image has nothing to do with the word, read on...When I first started looking to buy a house, I had "electric range and heating" as a requirement because I was terrified of gas. I was sincerely afraid that I would somehow blow myself up. Since I cook a lot, I felt this fear was justified. I bought this home because the pros outweighed the cons, and I still love it. But having gas heat still scares me, especially because the heater is in a closet in my bedroom.Last night, after nearly a year in my new home, the carbon monoxide alarm in my bedroom went off. For about ten minutes before this, my computer speakers had been picking up a mumbling voice that was asking a question repeatedly (I couldn't tell what it was asking, but it was the same inflection and syllables, over and over), which had already put me on edge. After I called out the firemen to check for a leak, and they had come and gone (with me suffering a few mean scratches from terrified cats I was trying to hold on to outside), I called my mother. I was seriously freaked out and wound up, and I realized there are precious few people I can call to discuss this series of events with and not have them laugh outright or think I'm crazy for thinking spooks might be spooking me.The conversation helped, but my fear of the gas heater flared anew, and I slept downstairs last night, as far as I could get from it. Today, I got a technician out here to double-check things and he found a loose fitting, which he glued. I feel a little better.But I'm still looking at the door to the heater slightly askance.And I don't have an explanation for the speakers, which have never picked up neighbors' conversations before. If it happens again tonight, I'll be huddling again downstairs, this time as far away from my office as possible.