Friday, December 09, 2016

Thursday's lunch

On Thursday, I had lunch inside the building where I work. The basement restaurant I went to is one at which I'm a regular; the ladies serve large portions of good Korean food at a very reasonable price. On this particular day, I was coming into the restaurant as several managers at my company were leaving. One of them stopped at the register and quietly told one of the ladies that he would cover the cost of my lunch, which I thought was a very nice gesture.

What you see in the image is ddeok mandu-guk, i.e., potsticker soup with sliced-up rice cakes. Very tasty, especially with all the sides.

(I hate the word "potsticker," by the way.)

2 comments:

Charles said...

Which is worse? "Dumpling," which sounds like a diminutive term for feces, or "potsticker," which sounds mildly vulgar?

I think I gotta go with "dumpling" here. I just don't like the way "potsticker" sounds.

Kevin Kim said...

We're on roughly the same wavelength about dumplings.

For me, yes, it's how "potsticker" sounds. Too many Germanic-style interruptive consonants that create an unpleasant sound quality. "Dumpling" has intervening consonants, but the move from the initial "duh" to the bilabial-stop "M" sound is a natural progression of the speech organs (a simple closing of the mouth), and the bilabial "P" that follows the "M" is a natural outgrowth of the "M." The final "-ling" is an aurally inoffensive conclusion to the word, so overall, "dumpling" simply flows better to my ear than does "potsticker." The sound created by the speech organs follows (when I imagine it) a cosine pattern: mouth open, mouth closed, mouth open.