Tue 2 Mar 2010
Thawed = Unfrozen
Posted by Fredric Koeppel under Fer Gawd's Sake! , What Were They Thinking[6] Comments
You know F.K.’s Laws of Blogging, right?
1. Be honest.
2. Be fair.
3. Don’t be an asshole.
Well, honestly, I don’t want to be an asshole, but how can people be so abjectly ignorant of language, especially the language and vocabulary of their field?
There’s a recipe in the March 2010 issue of Bon Appetit, a magazine we cook from sometimes, that calls for a bag of frozen shelled edamame, “unthawed.”
Where are the freaking editors?
The word is “thaw,” past tense or predicate adjective, “thawed.”
“Unthawed” is a folk locution, a back-formation based on the mistaken notion that transforming an entity from one state to another requires “un-ing” it. Not so. Frozen is frozen; the act of unfreezing something, a TV dinner, a bag of edamame, a game hen, is “thawing.”
“Unthawing,” theoretically, would mean “freezing,” as in, “Man, it’s so cold outside that my hands are totally unthawed!”
Sheesh.
March 3rd, 2010 at 12:44 am
Scene: The Bon Appetit editorial offices.
Editor 1: Frozen edamame?
Editor 2: Huh?
Editor 1: This dip recipe says to use frozen edamame, but it doesn’t say if you thaw the beans first.
Editor 2: Well, since it says frozen, I’m guessing — and, mind you, this is just a guess — that the edamame are to be used frozen.
Editor 1: Thanks so much for that elucidation. My point, asshole, is that’s what it says, but is that what the author means to say? I’ll call her.
We move ahead ten minutes.
Editor 2: Mmm, I love this yerba mate sample we got from the Yerba Mate Growers’ Guild of Puerto Rico.
Editor 1: Puerto Rico? I’d never drink yerba mate that wasn’t from Uruguay.
Editor 2: (After long pause) What’s the word on the edamame?
Editor 1: Oh, she said they go in unthawed.
Editor 2: (After spitting out a mouthful of yerba mate) Unthawed?
Editor 1: I know. What a rube.
Editor 2: That’s like, “Man, it’s so cold outside that my hands are totally unthawed!”
Editor 1: Ha, yeah, good one.
Editor 2: So what are you going to do?
Editor 1: I’m going to add in “unthawed.”
Editor 2: Better. If you don’t, you know we’d get a thousand emails asking, “Do the edamame go in still frozen or unthawed?” and Barbara would have your ass in a sling.
March 3rd, 2010 at 7:23 am
ha!
March 3rd, 2010 at 9:08 am
This is funny, but maybe only to a writer who has had to ‘splain such things to a few editors over the years…why are they always younger than I? (which one of them is sure to change to “younger than me.”)
March 3rd, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Fredric – this is one of the reason why we love you!
March 3rd, 2010 at 5:04 pm
As the greatest practitioner of the English language, John Milton, might have said, “You da man.”
March 3rd, 2010 at 6:14 pm
What about recipe editing in general? There’s the restaurant recipes that are cut down but don’t work the same way in smaller quantities, the notorious “ingredient never mentioned in the instructions”, as well as the outright wrong advice entirely. I saw one recently for a tri-tip roast that suggested a quick cooking over a hot grill for five minutes on each side, which would result in a mostly raw, cold, and tough chunk of beef. At the very end the recipe suggested substituting flank steak if necessary–which could actually work. Proof that a recipe originally for flank steak was just tweaked poorly to fit a demand for a tri-tip article.