We discovered this morning that we have tickets for an Olympics 2012 event.
We've no idea which one but there are four of us and £71 has been taken from our account so we're pretty doubtful we'll be attending the opening ceremony. To be honest I don't even know what we've applied for and I'm already worried about staffing the day here when I head on down to the smoke to watch the heats of the horse-dancing with ribbons.
I am concerned about something else too.
I am very proud of my menu board. I am pedantic about spelling and grammar and insist that apostrophes will only appear in the correct place in any establishment run by me.
So imagine how distraught I felt when I heard one of my customers suggesting to his partner, as they perused the board, that he might order a "panino".
Of course that makes the plural "panini".
But on my board it says "Paninis".
He said nothing but I knew what he was thinking, and Oh the shame.
The board rubber will be put to use first thing in the morning.
It's a Bank Holiday tomorrow.
The forecast is dreadful.
But that could be misleading.
Hi Gill,
ReplyDeleteYou learn something every day; I was quite unaware that "panini" is the plural of "panino", therefore you can have one panino or several panini. This is what it says about the matter on Wikipedia:
Panini are sandwich-like food items, Italian in origin, but now international.
In Italy, a panino is the word for sandwich. In Italy, sandwiches are customarily made from a piece of roll or loaf of bread, typically a ciabatta or a rosetta. The loaf is cut horizontally and filled with salami, ham, cheese, mortadella or other food, and sometimes served hot after having been pressed in a grill. A toasted sandwich, colloquially called "toast" by Italians, is made out of two vertical slices of pane in cassetta almost invariably filled with prosciutto and a few slices of cheese, grilled in a sandwich press. In Central Italy, there is a popular version of panino which is filled with porchetta, i.e. slices of roasted pork. It is traditionally served without any kind of sauce or topping. Some maintain they are the same as 'toasties' but with a different shape.
Your friendly church steward,
David Pagett.
P.S. See you on Friday P.M. as I am stewarding that day in the afternoon.
David, Since you only ever order the English form of the sandwich you need not worry about the singular or plural. Saying you'd like "a ham sandwich" or "ham sandwiches" will pretty much get you the same thing. Add "per favore" and who knows what will arrive...
ReplyDeleteIn the local Italian bakeries that I use (oooh, get me...), they often refer to bread rolls as 'panini' (singular or plural) to differentiate from a loaf (pane).
ReplyDeleteAlthough they could just be humouring my appalling Italian.