On Nov 12, 11:27*am, " >
wrote:
> I find North American English, with its propensity for inverting
> syntactically sound expressions and creating verbs out of sows' ears
> (to Christmas shop, to grocery shop, etc.), has produced some rather
> unappetizing terms for food usually as some sort of abbreviation. *A
> few came up recently and I thought I'd start a thread on this, as a
> form of recreation (because this is after all a rec.* newsgroup).
>
> NOTE: I specifically said North American as this aberration can also
> be found in parts of Canada.
>
> So here are a few:
>
> "from scratch", or worse "scratch" (as in "scratch cake"...oy, the
> mental image of cake made from flaky dead skin or dandruff)
>
> "tub" as in "tub of margarine" or yogurt, or worse "tub butter". *What
> the hell is "tub butter" and who would want any? *The word "tub"
> conjures up the idea of a large receptacle in which people bathe and
> lose their dead skin, floating in soapy water...again with the dead
> skin image.
>
> "tablespread" or the use of "spread" to mean a soft substance...I'm
> not even going there.

Comes from that great kid song which most of us were privy to during
our formative years:

Great big gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts
mutilated monkey meat
little birdie's bloody feet
One half pint of all purpose porpoise pus
floating in grade A blood,
and me without a spooooon!
(there are variations; my DH from NJ has a somewhat different
version)

maxine in ri
repository of many many many songs of similar caliber