Juice and water-based smoothies

[Benjamin Barrett]

I'm having trouble blending vegetables/fruit and yogurt in the blender because the mass rises, leaving the blades to spin on empty and burn out the engine. So I post on Facebook to ask how to make juice in a blender and am told you can't juice with a blender, you can make smoothies. My friend advises that yogurt in smoothies is yucky; she uses water and adds avocado, nuts, tahini or the like to add body.

Okay, so I didn't know what the word "juice" means. And, actually, I guess I still don't.

Anyway, newly disabused from the idea that smoothies must have yogurt and figuring that smoothie would be easier to figure out than the definition of juice, I looked in the ADS archives. While there are a lot of posts about smoothies, they are primarily about antedating the word. 

The OED claims that a smoothy is "...puréed with milk, yoghurt, or ice cream." Wikipedia disagrees (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoothy), claiming that fruit and "a milkshake-like consistency that is thicker than slush drinks" are the requirements. The Wiktionary (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/smoothie) definition needs work: "A drink made from whole fruit, thus thicker than fruit juice."

http://perfectsmoothie.com/what-is-a-smoothie says: "a thick blended beverage with shake like consistency, normally pureed in a blender containing fruits and/or vegetables as well as an added liquid such as fruit juice, vegetable juice, milk, or even yogurt."

Benjamin Barrett
Seattle, WA
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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org