Thread: vegeterian? which one!?

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    Registered User axon's Avatar
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    vegeterian? which one!?

    I'm pretty sure there are members here who are vegetarian - if so, what kind-of vegetarian are you?

    ang how would you guys pronounce 'vegan'?

    this was pretty amuzing: " The strict term can be politically parodied: the humorist Dave Barry, in a healing postelection column, urged readers not to stereotype red-state voters as ''knuckle-dragging Nascar-obsessed cousin-marrying roadkill-eating'' rednecks, nor blue-state voters as ''tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts.'' "

    source: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/ma...tml?oref=login
    Vegan
    By WILLIAM SAFIRE

    Published: January 30, 2005

    "By all that is sacred in our hopes for the human race,'' wrote the passionate poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1813, ''I conjure those who love happiness and truth, to give a fair trial to the vegetable system.'' The cardinal rule of that blithe spirit: ''Never take any substance into the stomach that once had life.''

    That philosophy of diet was first recorded by Pythagoras of Samos who munched on his veggies around the fifth century B.C., with Greek philosophers like Plato, Epicurus and Plutarch embracing fleshless eating with enthusiasm. A few decades after Bish's endorsement (the teenager he seduced and later married, Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, called him Bish), the diet was being called vegetarian, a word popularized by the formation of the vegetarian Society at Ramsgate, England, in 1847. After its planting, that word grew (from the Latin vegetare, ''to grow'') for a century.

    Then along came the Yorkshireman Donald Watson, a woodworker in Britain and a devotee of greens, who was looking for a name for his newsletter. ''We should all consider carefully,'' he wrote his early subscribers in 1944, ''what our Group, and our magazine, and ourselves, shall be called.'' He was tired of typing the long word vegetarian thousands of times and believed nondairy was too negative: ''Moreover it does not imply that we are opposed to the use of eggs as food. We need a name that suggests what we do eat.'' He rejected vegetarian and fruitarian as ''associated with societies that allow the 'fruits'(!) of cows and fowls.'' (That's milk and eggs; the poet Robert Lowell wrote in 1959 of a ''fly-weight pacifist,/so vegetarian, /he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit.'')

    Watson suggested to his readers that the newsletter be called The Vegan News. ''Our diet will soon become known as a vegan diet, and we should aspire to the rank of vegans.''

    As his subscribers swallowed his coinage, Watson promptly made it an -ism : ''Veganism is the practice of living on fruits, nuts, vegetables, grains and other wholesome nonanimal products.'' He thus dissociated his strict -ism from that of vegetarianism, a less rigorous regime that usually permits the eating of eggs, dairy products and honey, as well as the wearing of animal products like leather, wool and silk. (To get the vitamin B12 in animal products, many vegans drink fortified soy milk or take a vitamin pill. Mother's milk is permitted for babies.)

    Vegetarian has another offshoot besides the aforesaid fruitarian: ''Pescetarian is a frequently used term for those alleged veggies who eat seafood (but not meat or fowl),'' noted a writer in The Guardian in 2002, ''and irritate meat eaters and genuine vegetarians the world over.''

    One who exclusively noshes on crudités (a Yiddish-English-French phrase) is called a rawist. Also coined in the early 90's is flexitarian, one who eats vegetarian dishes at home but will go along with meat, fish or fowl in a restaurant or as a guest. (A food pollster would call these loosey-goosey gourmands swing eaters.)

    In the recent presidential campaign, Ralph Nader revealed his food flexitarianism -- no meat, but fish is O.K. -- while Representative Dennis Kucinich firmly asserted his status as a vegan. The strict term can be politically parodied: the humorist Dave Barry, in a healing postelection column, urged readers not to stereotype red-state voters as ''knuckle-dragging Nascar-obsessed cousin-marrying roadkill-eating'' rednecks, nor blue-state voters as ''tofu-chomping holistic-wacko neurotic vegan weenie perverts.''

    Vegan, too, has its offshoot: a freegan is an anticonsumerist who eats only what others throw away. Unlike a dumpster diver, a freegan (hard g) limits his scrounging to edibles. I believe this term is too close to euphemisms for copulation to be more than a nonce word.

    Do not confuse the noun vegan with the intransitive verb to veg out. The latter is based on vegetate, ''to exist passively,'' coined in that sense by the playwright Colley Cibber in 1740. It means ''to droop into such a state of insensibility as to appear to become a vegetable.''

    My problem with vegan, now affirmatively used as self-description by roughly two million Americans, is its pronunciation. Does the first syllable sound like the vedge in vegetable, with the soft g? Or is it pronounced like the name sci-fi writers have given the blue-skinned aliens from far-off Vega: VEE-gans or VAY-gans?

    For this we turn to the word's coiner: ''The pronunciation is VEE-gan,'' Watson told Vegetarians in Paradise, a Los Angeles-based Web site, last year, ''not vay-gan, veggan or veejan.'' He chooses the ee sound followed by a hard g. That's decisive but not definitive; some lexicographers differ, and pronunciation will ultimately be determined by the majority of users.

    I'll go along with the coiner's pronunciation of VEE-gan. He's a charmingly crotchety geezer who began as a vegetarian. ''When my older brother and younger sister joined me as vegetarians, nonsmokers, teetotalers and conscientious objectors,'' Watson says, ''my mother said she felt like a hen that had hatched a clutch of duck eggs.'' He obviously inherited her feel for language. I'm a carnivore myself -- an animal that delights in eating other animals -- but won't treat this guy like a fad-diet freak: Watson has a major coinage under his belt, and he's a spry 94.
    edit:: I'm reading and posting this while chomping down on a juicy double cheezburger from photos....mmm

    some entropy with that sink? entropysink.com

    there are two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness. - franz kafka

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    Mayor of Awesometown Govtcheez's Avatar
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    > a freegan is an anticonsumerist who eats only what others throw away.

    Round here we call those people "bums".

    I've always pronounced/heard vegan pronounced with a long e and a hard g.

    Also, it's kind of stupid for someone to call themselves vegetarians if they still eat fish or chicken or whatever. I'm a vegetarian, but I still eat all sorts of meat

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    5|-|1+|-|34|) ober's Avatar
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    My wife likes to pretend that she's vegetarian sometimes, but she has to have a burger from time to time and generally eats meat on almost a daily basis. I don't personally think that I could live the lifestyle. I think I need meat to survive.

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    ATH0 quzah's Avatar
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    I compile my food with "-vegan -pedantic", in other words, I'm a strict vegan. You can always consult the dictionary for pronunciation.

    I agree with Govt on his comment above. It's annoying to listen to people who think they're hip or "saving the world" or something because they're "vegetarian". Vegetarians annoy the hell out of me. Either do or don't, don't half-ass it. I particularly like the ones who eat seafood or chicken and still insist that they're "vegetarian". Or the ones who eat eggs. Or people who say they're vegan, but really are just some lame ass vegetarian variant.

    And before some dumb I am sillyI am sillyI am sillyI am silly starts in with the lame meat eater jokes, I've heard them all. They weren't funny the first time, they won't be funny now. I couldn't care less what it is you eat. Just don't try to pretend you're doing something great by not eating red meat, or try to put yourself in my class.

    Quzah.
    Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.

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    ATH0 quzah's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by ober
    I don't personally think that I could live the lifestyle. I think I need meat to survive.
    No you don't. You just think you do.

    Quzah.
    Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.

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    Mayor of Awesometown Govtcheez's Avatar
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    > I couldn't care less what it is you eat.

    I've always thought it was a pretty ridiculous thing to impose your eating standards, of all things, on people. "Come on, eat this burger!" and "You're harming the planet!" have never made anyone change their minds. My boss, who I go out to lunch with pretty much every day, is a vegetarian. He doesn't care that I eat meat, and I don't care he doesn't. I do feel kind of sorry that there's usually only 1 or 2 things he can order when we go out, though.

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    5|-|1+|-|34|) ober's Avatar
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    >> I do feel kind of sorry that there's usually only 1 or 2 things he can order when we go out, though.

    Exactly. Do you mind if I ask what it is that you do eat, Quzah? I eat a lot of veggies... but I just need something else sometimes.

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    I just don't like vegetables because they are gross.
    See you in 13

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    Registered User axon's Avatar
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    >>I just don't like vegetables because they are gross.<<

    if you're trying to be funny, you're not. If you're serious, I'm pretty sure you have not tried everything thats out there; the variety of tastes in the vegetable world is so big and so diverse, that there must be a few things you would enjoy.

    some entropy with that sink? entropysink.com

    there are two cardinal sins from which all others spring: Impatience and Laziness. - franz kafka

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    I'm being serious. vegetables taste like crap. Except chewing tobacco.
    See you in 13

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    Redundantly Redundant RoD's Avatar
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    Thats not a vegtable you friggen moron.

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    and i supposed next you are going to tell me a tomato is a fruit.
    See you in 13

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    I am me, who else?
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    It is indeed check the definition of a fruit and sure enough a tomato is a fruit! that being said I don't see what the big deal is what you eat or whatever anyone else eats. You were born an omnivore, though you may choose a vegetarian lifestyle which is probably more healthy. Do I care if anyone here is a vegetarian? Nah I respect what you think is the right way to eat, just common sense .

  14. #14
    Toaster Zach L.'s Avatar
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    Merriam-Webster has the audio for the pronunciation. They have four variants, though. The first is what I've heard and say... the last two sound positively stupid (the pronunciations).
    The word rap as it applies to music is the result of a peculiar phonological rule which has stripped the word of its initial voiceless velar stop.

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    Handy Andy andyhunter's Avatar
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    >or try to put yourself in my class.

    quzah - you are definetly in a class all by yourself.
    i don't think most standard compilers support programmers with more than 4 red boxes - Misplaced

    It is my sacred duity to stand in the path of the flood of ignorance and blatant stupidity... - quzah

    Such pointless tricks ceased to be interesting or useful when we came down from the trees and started using higher level languages. - Salem

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