Talk:Shanghai fried noodles

Latest comment: 1 year ago by Findlaigh in topic Vague language, vague descriptions

Lo Mein

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Is this different from Lo Mein? Shofet tsaddiq (talk) 20:58, 13 February 2019 (UTC)Reply

Vague language, vague descriptions

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Every culture on the planet has a cereal based noodle. They're not "some type of staple" , they ARE a staple and they are indeed bread 2.0 - the 'other bread' , the second starch.

Please avoid words without meaning. Definitions are meant to condense, "some type of..." which appears often has a 'watchamacallit" ring to it. It does not condense. It dilutes. The language lacks authority.

If we swap "some" for "several", we reassert tonal authority despite the fact that we haven't added specificity. Quite simply, "some" is the most widely used prefix for "don't know/not" ; somewhere, sometime, someone, somehow, someday are evasions. We use them deliberately when we don't want others to know and we use them innocently when we ourselves don't know.  "Several is rather vague too but it denotes quantity. Wow, this is pedantry in motion.

There's another use of 'some type of' which can't be cosmetically corrected because the flaw lies with the data.

Noodles don't come from "some type of dough", they're shaped and prepared from dough as all breads are. What comes out of the ground, is milled, ground and watered into dough. Most white pasta comes from semolina. Semolina is wheat.

Perhaps "unleavened" requires more detail? Leavening has its roots is Leve, leva (to rise, LAT. Leavening agents are unrefined or simple (organic) sugars. Yeast is magical stuff that heats up when it binds with water's hydrogen molecule. No, this is too much detail and I'm a little unsure about the chemistry.

I guess it would be enough to describe unleavened as dough without yeast

Unleavened bread was the first and only staple. I wonder who first thought of yeast. It sounds like one of those happy accidents. It's fascinating though; the world was flat bread for millenia after millenia though a long way from noodles, much less baguette. I just realised I know hardly anything about the oldest food on the planet, that's the trouble with us language pedants, we are terribly uninformed.

I'm trying to imagine a world with no yeast - a world without yeast would be a world without whiskey. Oh the horror. Findlaigh (talk) 00:46, 31 August 2023 (UTC)Reply