How To Properly Eat a Burger?

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I think I was 10 when I figured out how strange it was to ask for a Coke. "Mr. I want a Coke." (I meant it too.) Then he asked "What flavor?" "7up."
 
Words can also mean more than one thing at a time!
Of course, when the things aren't COMPETING for the definition, when there's no ambiguity. But in this case THERE IS. When this phenomenon arises, we usually get "back-definitions", like Football and American Football or "Soccer". Imagine if there was no way to verbally distinguish American Football from soccer and people went around calling them both the same thing and having to stop and explain which one they mean every time someone else came over. This is what's happening to "taco" right now, we need a backronym for american tacos or for english to start using "mexican taco" or SOMETHING.
 

BananaHands

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I think I was 10 when I figured out how strange it was to ask for a Coke. "Mr. I want a Coke." (I meant it too.) Then he asked "What flavor?" "7up."
Oh yeah, when I went to school in Kentucky I was so confused when my roommate said he filled up the fridge with cokes and there was a bunch of mountain dew in there.
 
We need to get twitchmoss in here to complain about what is and isn't a biscuit.
Right, what you call cookie is a biscuit in UK and whatnot, but even then you guys have OTHER words you can use, even if different countries don't agree which is which. "Taco" is alone, though, unless you go around calling them "tortilla-wrapped meat things", but then how does that include a hard shell too? Am I getting my point across? There's no other word we can fight over.
 
Well the ethnic Mexicans in Texas and New Mexico have been making crispy tacos for about 100 years. It is Taco Bell that made the crispy taco sweep the land about 50 years ago.
 

BananaHands

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Beginning from the early part of the twentieth century, various styles of tacos have become popular in the United States and Canada.[12] An early appearance of a description of the taco in the United States in English was in a 1914 cookbook, California Mexican-Spanish Cookbook, by Bertha Haffner Ginger.[13] The style that has become most common is the hard-shell, U-shaped version described in a cookbook, The good life: New Mexican food, authored by Fabiola Cabeza de Vaca Gilbert and published in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1949.[14]These have been sold by restaurants and by fast food chains. Even non-Mexican oriented fast food restaurants have sold tacos. Mass production of this type of taco was encouraged by the invention of devices to hold the tortillas in the U-shape as they were deep-fried. A patent for such a device was issued to New York restaurateur Juvenico Maldonado in 1950, based on his patent filing of 1947 (U.S. Patent No. 2,506,305).[15][16] Such tacos are crisp-fried corn tortillas filled with seasoned ground beef, cheese, lettuce, and sometimes tomato, onion, salsa, sour cream, and avocado or guacamole
 
Beginning from the early part of the twentieth century, various styles of tacos have become popular in the United States and Canada.[12] An early appearance of a description of the taco in the United States in English was in a 1914 cookbook, California Mexican-Spanish Cookbook, by Bertha Haffner Ginger.[13] The style that has become most common is the hard-shell, U-shaped version described in a cookbook, The good life: New Mexican food, authored by Fabiola Cabeza de Vaca Gilbert and published in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1949.[14]These have been sold by restaurants and by fast food chains. Even non-Mexican oriented fast food restaurants have sold tacos. Mass production of this type of taco was encouraged by the invention of devices to hold the tortillas in the U-shape as they were deep-fried. A patent for such a device was issued to New York restaurateur Juvenico Maldonado in 1950, based on his patent filing of 1947 (U.S. Patent No. 2,506,305).[15][16] Such tacos are crisp-fried corn tortillas filled with seasoned ground beef, cheese, lettuce, and sometimes tomato, onion, salsa, sour cream, and avocado or guacamole
I don't get your point. Soft tacos have been around since prehispanic times 600, 700 years ago or more... this is not about something "recent", it's about a word missing to distinguish the taco-variations.
 

BananaHands

Staff member
I don't get your point. Soft tacos have been around since prehispanic times 600, 700 years ago or more... this is not about something "recent", it's about a word missing to distinguish the taco-variations.
I wasn't making a point, I just googled it and found it interesting because I wasn't aware there was no such thing as a hard-shell taco in mexico until this thread.
 
OK, you need to come to America and open a bakery to make decent corn tortillas. The soft corn tortillas made in the states SUCK, unless you fry it to a crisp.
 
I wasn't making a point, I just googled it and found it interesting because I wasn't aware there was no such thing as a hard-shell taco in mexico until this thread.
Oh, yeah, you guys are alone in that. I remember when Taco Bell tried to open a franchise in Mexico City in the early 90s, late 80s. They were in business like a whole two weeks.

Mexicans that travel to the US tend to LOATHE taco bell cause, well, they're not tacos... but I've always insisted that they're perfectly fine if you see them as what they are... junk food that has nothing to do with tacos. It's hard for lots of my friends to make the distinction though. I'm the reasonable one.

Imagine that.[DOUBLEPOST=1359149779][/DOUBLEPOST]
OK, you need to come to America and open a bakery to make decent corn tortillas. The soft corn tortillas made in the states SUCK, unless you fry it to a crisp.
Fun fact, we have both bakeries AND tortillerias, different places. Tortillerias are usually tiny, make nothing else, but make literally thousands a day and have long lines at certain hours. Of course, these days even large chain supermarkets have "mini-tortillerias". They're big ass machines too:

 
It's technically "tortillería", with an accent in the second i. Going by how you guys say my name, it must be hilarious to hear you guys pronounce that.
 

GasBandit

Staff member
It's technically "tortillería", with an accent in the second i. Going by how you guys say my name, it must be hilarious to hear you guys pronounce that.
Tor-TEE-uh-REE-uh.

But it is fun to hear the yanks call them "Tortilly-areas."
 
There needs to be such a thing as a quesadilleria, just because it would be fun to say, and fun to watch people try to say and fail.
 
There needs to be such a thing as a quesadilleria, just because it would be fun to say, and fun to watch people try to say and fail.
There are. They're usually old ladies making them in a street-cart thingie, and we usually call them "la señora de las quesadillas" (quesadilla lady), but they're technically quesadillerías, heh.

Tor-TEE-uh-REE-uh.

But it is fun to hear the yanks call them "Tortilly-areas."
It's more like Tor-tee-yeh-REE-ah.
 
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