Imitation or counterfeit?

[Dan Goncharoff]

I know that European law uses imitation, with respect to food, to mean
objects that look like food but are not edible, such as candles and
soaps.
DanG



On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 9:14 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Imitation or counterfeit?
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>
> The recent news is that hairy crabs that were not taken from the
> source of the esteemed variety of hairy crab, Yangcheng Lake, China,
> are being prawned off as genuine, in the amount of 10 times the
> genuine harvest.  This is such a problem that etching the genuine
> crabs with laser beams was tried, but did not work well.  Then the
> government printed up one million tags, to be attached by the
> licensed Yangcheng Lake crab harvesters to their catches -- but some
> have sold their allotments to unlicensed crab raisers, and also the
> tags have been faked.
>
> I believe I heard one commentator (on NPR?) refer to the ingenuine
> crabs as "imitation".  I would have said "counterfeit".  But either
> notion is somehow humorous when I think of those words being applied
> to crabs that actually grew naturally somewhere.  (I concede
> that"counterfeit crab " should be understood as meaning "a
> counterfeit of the Yangcheng Lake crab", but that does not detract
> from my amusement.)
>
> Joel
>
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