[Not about language] Just came across this site, “Welcome to Dr. Zwicky’s”, which offers meat rubs:
Dr. Zwicky’s specializes in making the best tasting Meat Rub for you [sic] favorite cut of meat. Try it and you’ll agree that it is the “Dirtiest” Meat Rub on the market.
Dirty dirt·y [dur-tee]: adjective, slang, superlative
- Really good.
- Awesome.
Useage: “Wow! This meat rub is sooo good, it’s dirty.”
Dr. Zwicky’s sells:
Dirty Steak Rubs: Dr. Zwicky has developed the “dirtiest” steak rub. It tastes sooo good, you’ll want to slap your mama! [free sample available]
Dirty Pork Rubs: Dr. Zwicky is working on a Pork Rub that is sure to huff, and puff and blow the house down!
Dirty Chicken Rubs: Dr. Zwicky is in the kitchen with Chicken Little…who knows where that will lead?
I gather that all the rubs are too spicy for my current diet (no coffee, tea, alcohol, spicy food, fried food — or aspirin; very low salt, low carbs and fat). But maybe I could offer Dr. Zwicky’s Meat Rubs as enticements to students.
March 27, 2010 at 6:30 am |
Is that really what “dirty rice” means? I never knew.
March 27, 2010 at 8:29 am |
What do you mean, it’s not about language?
March 27, 2010 at 9:41 am |
To mae sander: well, the uses of dirty in the Dr. Zwicky’s ads and in “dirty rice” are probably related, but they aren’t the same. Dirty rice is so called because it looks brownish, because of the bits of chopped or ground meat in it. Classic Cajun dirty rice has chopped chicken gizzards and livers in it (it’s a food stretcher), but other versions have ground meat (usually beef) and/or bits of sausage in them — often with chopped cooked onions and/or green pepper, and almost always with a characteristic mixture of spices (heavy on things like cayenne and papika). The spices are referred to as “dirty rice spices” and are sold commercially in “dirty rice mixes”. They’re the connection to the (similar) assortments of spices in Dr. Zwicky’s dirty meat rubs.
But the dirty in the Dr. Zwicky’s ads goes on to convey something like ‘powerful-tasting’ and then ‘great-tasting’, converging with the slang inversion of dirty to convey fabulousness.
March 27, 2010 at 9:48 am |
To John Lawler: Ok, ok, just about anything can be made to be about language. Which Mae Sander has helped me see in this case.
March 27, 2010 at 12:56 pm |
More to John Lawler: Oh yes, there’s the nouning rub ‘substance for rubbing onto something’. OED2 has a number of senses in which the verb rub has been nouned over the years (notably in the sense ‘act of rubbing’, as in back rub and “it came off with a rub”), but it doesn’t have this one, which is more specific than seasoning and distinct from marinade in that rubs are dry rather than wet. (I have a seasoning from Penzey’s labeled as “pasta sprinkle”, with the nouning sprinkle in a sense parallel to rub; that is, it’s an herb and spice mixture for sprinkling on pasta.)
March 30, 2010 at 9:15 am |
That last sentence, given the double-entendre on “meat”, might be risky even for a tenured professor!
July 3, 2010 at 9:31 pm |
[…] Zwicky stuff By arnoldzwicky So, Google Alert, scanning for references to the name Zwicky on the web, recently came up with the Zwicky tank truck, adding yet another product to the growing list of Zwicky things (among them chocolate, muesli, thread and yarn, arrowheads for bow-and-arrow hunting, and meat rub). […]
July 2, 2014 at 3:00 pm |
I have a feeling offering that sort of thing to students is a good way to get a visit from the HR department…