Dim sum =? savory snack

[Benjamin Barrett]

On Aug 17, 2011, at 3:44 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:

> At 8/17/2011 06:17 PM, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
>>
>> On Aug 17, 2011, at 2:36 PM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>>
>>> Do you consider "snacks" as always "to go"?  I
>>> don't.  OED n.2, 4.b "A mere bite or morsel of
>>> food, as contrasted with a regular meal; a light
>>> or incidental repast".  More than 3 or 4 dim sum
>>> dishes becomes a meal, so that part of the OED definition is OK  :-).
>>
>> Maybe it's because I haven't been a kid or been around kids for so
>> long, but the word "snack" just doesn't come to mind other than as
>> "snack food." If you were to run by the local burger joint and pick
>> up some fries, would you say "I had a snack"? Okay, probably so.
>
> I haven't been a kid for a while either, but "snack" to me did not
> always mean take-out -- it was sometimes what I had when I came home
> from school and other times what I picked up (and took out, and ate)
> on my way home, so my mother didn't know.

Well, with dim sum, how else are you going to get it in a form you would call a snack? If you eat it in the restaurant, is it a snack? To me it would be a light lunch, but even so, it's not a snack food, it's a food that is being eaten as a snack/light lunch. Is a slider a snack (slider has recently become a viable word in Seattle, but it's not in the OED yet)? Doesn't seem like it to me. You can have one as a snack, but it doesn't seem like a snack per se.

>
>> Nevertheless, is the food orientation (LOL) of dim sum snacky? It's
>> always great when someone brings some chasiu bao or siumai to share,
>> but I associate it primarily with lunch.
>
> The real gourmets, the Jewish, eat dim sum at any time of the day on
> Sundays.  :-)

We have all-day dim sum here in Seattle, too, but it's primarily a lunch food.

>
>> So it's like bringing French fries to the office. Yeah, people snack
>> on them, but French fries don't strike me as a snacky food, per se.
>> They are a food that can be eaten as a snack, but being a snack is
>> not part of their definition.
>
> P.S.  About four custards on a plate, Wiki tells me four is an
> unlucky number (three is lucky).  (In Seoul, a hotel I stayed at
> circa 1990 had no 4th -- and nor 13th -- floors.)

It comes from the Chinese reading of four, which means death. You can still find places in Japan where they do that, but it's not so common.

Looking at MandarinTools.com, 四 (four) is si4 in Mandarin and sei3 in Cantonese.
Death is si3 in Mandarin and sei2 in Cantonese.
Both are shi in Japanese and sa in Korean.

Also, see:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%9B%9B
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E6%AD%BB

BB

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