Italian, again

[finta]

I wonder just how important it is to learn an Italian word for a type of food that I don't eat and wouldn't recognize.  Like  "zwieback."  In books, zwieback is the sort of food you fall back on when you're really hungry and there's nothing else around.  Or you give it to teething babies.  From which I deduce that it's hard and something that doesn

Comments

[tangledaria]

I kind of have that same problem with German foods. There are words that I never set out to learn but learned them somewhere along the way and are of no use to me. For instance, "spargel" is asparagus, which I absolutely cannot stand and would never ask for but it's always in season when I go to Germany and they always have it on sale. And then others stick in my head because they're so weird, "ananas" are pineapple, not bananas as I thought. "Forelle" (trout) I know because it's a song not because I would ever eat it.

And yet, for the life of me, I can never remember the word for "fork" when I need to. I always have to say, "Not the spoon, not the knife, but the . . " So embarrassing.

[finta]

"Pineapple" is "ananas" in Italian too. How...odd. I wonder why it's the same in both languages? And for that matter, why do we call it a pineapple, when it has nothing to do with apples or pine trees?

*ponders*