Reuben & Rachel

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated 7/31/02 6:14:35 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:

>  I've been eating cole slaw
>  off and on for half a century and I can never recall one of the main
>  ingredients in Thousand Island dressing, viz. ketchup, being part of
>  the dressing.  Most versions have combinations of mayonnaise and
>  vinegar, with (hopefully not too much) sugar to offset the vinegar,
>  maybe mustard, and so on.   If Thousand Island dressing intervened,
>  cole slaw would be pink instead of white, and I wouldn't want it on
>  my sandwiches either.  Or are there relevant idiocrunches for cole
>  slaw and/or Thousand Island dressing that I need to know about?

Just as gefulte fish is "that great Jewish invention for making horseradish
edible", so the purpose of the Reuben is to make sauerkraut behave in polite
company.  You could even make a Kosher Reuben---sauerkraut, Swiss cheese, and
Thousand Island dressing, or perhaps keep the meat but leave off the cheese.
In other words, the essence of the Reuben is the (tamed) sauerkraut.

My objection to a sandwich having Thousand Island dressing and cole slaw is
not what the tomato and/or pickles would do to the slaw.  Rather it was the
effect of the mayonnaise-derivative dressing of the "white" cole slaw when it
diluted the Thousand Island dressing.

I've never tried adding ketchup or tomato sauce to cole slaw.  I agree about
how unappetizing green-white cabbage pieces in pink sauce would be.  However,
maybe if you added tomato something to cole slaw made with RED cabbage...

My mother never approved of much that President Nixon did,  but they both
agreed that cottage cheese should be served with ketchup.

By the way, a deli near where I worked 1976-79 sold "hot slaw" from which I
assumed the manager thought the usual dish was "cold slaw".

In a message dated 7/31/02 10:23:21 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
ADS-L at HIGHLANDS.COM writes:

> Many people find some of what Barry is posting as IRRELEVANT.  I for
>  one would have a much harder time researching "food words" were it not
>  for his USEFUL RESEARCH.  Thank you very much for the research, Barry,
>  and as for the other: perhaps the most important addition to the qwerty
>  keyboard has been the "delete" key.  Thank you to whom ever we are
>  indebted for it.

There was a DELETE key on the old Teletype machines, such as the Model 33
(now long forgotten, but once as much a symbol of computing as the punch
card, so much so that---Fred Shapiro please note---in the early 1980's I
remember someone writing a message on-line that read "...since God invented
the Model 33.")  The Teletype machines used paper tape and the DELETE key
caused a character on the tape being read to be deleted from the tape being
punched.

So who invented the DELETE key?  Someone farily early in the development of
punched paper tape applications.  Thomas Edison, who did a lot of work on
improving telegraphy, is one suspect.

The standard abbreviation for "Teletype" is "TTY".  When computer terminals
with cathode-ray-tube (CRT) displays appeared, they were frequently referred
to as "glass TTY's".  The familiar scrolling mode on CRT's is a copy of the
behavior of the paper in a TTY (always adding a line at a time, with lines
disappearing over the top of the machine as the paper advanced.)  The term
"glass TTY" has long since disappeared, partly because only old-timers like
me remember TTY's, but also partly because the bit-image screen popularized
by Apple with their Lisa and MacIntosh (and imitated by Microsoft with
Windows and IBM with OS/2) is quite different from the TTY experience.

Here's a technical term I never met before---or maybe it's a nonce usage.
"dingbat".
Quotation is "The next 4096 codes are for punctuation, mathematical
operators, technical symbols, shapes, patterns, and even dingbats (decorative
characters that can represent religious symbols, smiling faces, chess pieces,
and so on)."  A set of such characters is available under Windows as the font
called "Wingdings".
Reference:  Kenneth M. Sheldon, "ASCII Goes Global", BYTE magazine, Jully
1991,(volume and number not available), page 112 last paragraph in column 1.
I will submit this one to the OED.

     - Jim Landau