Tricky Booze Words
Some beverages have hard-to-pronounce names. Here’s help.
Posted by: Jessica Voelker on Aug 01, 2010 at 10:40AM
2 Comments
A little while ago, I started collecting difficult-to-pronounce cocktail vocabulary—mostly words I myself mispronounced until some kind soul gently corrected me—with the intention of aggregating them into a blog post.
But leave it to our city’s former food critic Jonathan Kauffman, (once of Seattle Weekly now of San Francisco Weekly), to beat me to it.Kauffman has a series called “Don’t Sound Like a Tool” on the SFoodie blog—each post includes audio recordings of difficult-to-pronounce vocabulary from the culinary world. This June he did a two-parter featuring booze words.
Of course, part of mastering pronunciation is learning not to pronounce words too well. No one wants to hear you say “champahhhgne” like Christopher Walken in his SNL skit “The Continental.” That’s just creepy. And, although the SFoodie guy pronounces “genever” as “yenever,” I won’t be doing so. Too much.
A final note: The word orgeat is not on the list, but it is super-easy to butcher. Say “or-zha.”
Tags: Booze 101, Behind the bar
I agree—sometimes I feel overly douchey using completely accurate pronunciations. The word “bruschetta” comes to mind.
Yes! brusKKett-ah is a great example. Curaçao was always a huge one for me. Not like I’d EVER drink it, but when people say Cure-a-cow…ugh (in their defense though, it is often re-typed without the cedille).