Author Topic: SPOILER, Standard puzzle 6 Feb 2018 - Potato  (Read 3372 times)

whisky

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SPOILER, Standard puzzle 6 Feb 2018 - Potato
« on: February 06, 2018, 04:34:04 PM »
Greetings.
In today's 9 letter TERRORIST puzzle, Rosti is accepted.
I understand this to be a Swiss dish, similar to ( but better than ) hash browns.
In German/Swiss it is actually spelled with an umlaut O.
It is common ( as far as I know ) that a valid transliteration of Umlaut O in English is OE.
When I tried Roesti it was rejected.

Might this be worthy of consideration as a new word ?

Michael
« Last Edit: February 06, 2018, 04:46:28 PM by Alan W »

Alan W

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Re: SPOILER, Standard puzzle 6 Feb 2018 - Potato
« Reply #1 on: February 08, 2018, 01:52:40 PM »
You raise an interesting issue, whisky. The Wikipedia article on English terms with diacritical marks says (footnotes omitted):

Quote
In words of German origin, the letters with umlauts ä, ö, ü may be written ae, oe, ue. This could be seen in many newspapers during World War II, which printed Fuehrer for Führer. However, today umlauts are usually either left out, with no e following the previous letter, or in sources with a higher Manual of Style (such as the New York Times or The Economist) included as German.

The end of this passage is a bit unclear, but I think it means that the usual practice today is to simply drop the umlaut, unless the letter is printed with its umlaut.

Führer can be written in English with a lower-case f, as a common noun for a dictatorial leader, and so the word is accepted in Chi, with both possible no-umlaut spellings, fuhrer and fuehrer. I'm finding it hard to think of other words in the Chi lexicon that had an umlaut in their original German. Doppelganger/doppelgaenger are too long. Flugelhorn is not too long for a ten-letter puzzle, but the possible alternative fluegelhorn is too long. Uber was added as a word a few years ago, but I know for a fact that ueber was not included, because it never occurred to me or anyone else.

As far as roesti specifically is concerned, it is given as an alternate form to rösti by the Shorter Oxford and in the Dictionary.com entry based on the Random House dictionary. And it is used still in publications. The Canadian CBC News website in December 2016 had a recipe for "Salmon tartare and potato roesti". My local newspaper, the Melbourne Age, uses both rosti and roesti, with the former being about three times as frequent. (Presumably the word is not covered in their style guide, if they have one.) No umlaut appears that I can see, at least in the online version.

So I think the evidence is there for adding roesti to our words.
Alan Walker
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whisky

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Re: SPOILER, Standard puzzle 6 Feb 2018 - Potato
« Reply #2 on: February 08, 2018, 01:59:35 PM »
Hi Alan.

Thanks.
This is a CHI first for me.

Michael

Alan W

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Re: SPOILER, Standard puzzle 6 Feb 2018 - Potato
« Reply #3 on: February 08, 2018, 02:49:09 PM »
Don't get too used to it, Michael! I don't usually get around to responding to requests so promptly, but when it's a player's first suggestion I try to be a bit quicker.
Alan Walker
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whisky

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Re: SPOILER, Standard puzzle 6 Feb 2018 - Potato
« Reply #4 on: February 08, 2018, 04:23:01 PM »
Hi Alan

Used to it or not, it's still nice.
Thank you.

Nearly as nice as finding a rare and special gem of single malt whisky, at an auction or at an old and dusty bottle shop when the vendors don't know what they have.
I have been lucky in the past, but not as lucky as some.

Another collector told me he recently spied an old bottle, and coughed up the asking price of $AU 300 without blinking.
When he got home he did a bit of searching and found that the only other bottle of this 1950 gem on sale was listed at $AU 17,000.

Ah .. I can only dream.

pat

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Re: SPOILER, Standard puzzle 6 Feb 2018 - Potato
« Reply #5 on: February 08, 2018, 09:01:39 PM »
When he got home he did a bit of searching and found that the only other bottle of this 1950 gem on sale was listed at $AU 17,000.

Ah, you can put something on sale for any price you like but that doesn't mean that someone will be daft enough to stump up for it!

whisky

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Re: SPOILER, Standard puzzle 6 Feb 2018 - Potato
« Reply #6 on: February 09, 2018, 01:14:10 PM »
Pat

Of course you are correct.
There are some fanatics out there who pay some amazing prices for rare items.

If you are interested, you can take a peek at:
www.whiskyauctioneer.com

I cannot fathom paying those sort of prices.
Even if I did, I can only guess that one might be disappointed if such a special bottle was ever opened and savoured.
How could anything be 100+ times better than a standard, or even expensive bottle at say 100 quid.

It's a fascinating world.

Michael

pat

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Re: SPOILER, Standard puzzle 6 Feb 2018 - Potato
« Reply #7 on: February 09, 2018, 09:08:38 PM »
Everyone is of course perfectly at liberty to spend their money on whatever they choose but I find it quite obscene that we live in a world where people are starving to death and people sleep in cardboard boxes on the street, yet there are other people who will happily throw away thousands of pounds on a bottle of alcohol, whatever its provenance.