I posted this query on Facebook yesterday:
— AZ: I’ve been regularly getting a tv spot ad for the Boost Max nutritional drink , ‘Here’s to Now: Boost Max’ (published 8/13/24), in which a young Black man says what I hear as “Here’s to bean meat soup every Thursday” (which puzzles me). Can anyone correct — or confirm — my impression?
You can view the ad, from ispot.tv, here.
Crucially, I failed to take into account the context the speaker is in; I really should know better.
But Thomas Grano (Associate Professor of Linguistics at Indiana University Bloomington, and a 2006 Stanford BA in linguistics, yay us) does know better:
— TG > AZ: I think he’s saying “Here‘s to beating these two [AZ: there are basketball players in the background] every Thursday”.
(#1)
— AZ > TG: I think that’s it. And it makes sense in the context. (My initial mishearing was “pig meat soup”, but then I got the b, and then I couldn’t hear it fresh any more.) I do seem to be fixated on food [in this case, on ham and white bean soup; meanwhile, his pronunciation of beating has the merest trace of a medial t in it, and of course has n rather than ŋ in –ing; but these two heard as meat soup is considerably more complicated, though I’ll note here that it preserves the vowels, / i … u /]
As for ham and white bean soup, here’s one version, from the kitchn site “Classic Navy Bean Soup”:
(#2) Yum (photo by Vicky Wasik)
Leave a Reply