Nah, the reason she stuffs her head in your mouth is that she wants to eat your nummy tonsils. She just waits until you have good breath to do it, because ewww.

I should tell her that I had my tonsils removed when I was four....

P-C, that guy! With the tattoos! Who understands about Indian people getting grumpy about being called Pakistani! And who once chauffered another brown person from a different continent!

flails

...dude. I have no words. But I anticipate seeing you appear on Youtube, at least, if not on the actual telly, because surely to God he cannot have been for real?

And also - OMG, cilantro is just another word for coriander?

FINALLY I can weigh in on this timeless Buffista debate!

Coriander = yum.

There we are. All settled now.

And also - OMG, cilantro is just another word for coriander?

Was I right about them both being called coriander in the UK? Here, we use it two ways -- grind up the seeds as a spice, and eat the plant as an herb -- and the seeds are called coriander, but the herb is cilantro. Both are coriander in the UK?

(On one of my trips to Israel, after we'd been having the cilantro debate and Nilly hadn't been able to find the word in the dictionary and didn't know what we were talking about, I saw some in a grocery store and copied down the Hebrew label for it to give to Nilly when I saw her. Turned out she'd already figured it out, from a better dictionary. But the Hebrew is kusbara! It's fun to say.)

P-C, that guy! With the tattoos! Who understands about Indian people getting grumpy about being called Pakistani! And who once chauffered another brown person from a different continent!

We figured he had to be mentally ill or on drugs. There is just no fathoming a sober man in possession of his full mental faculties behaving that way.

Yes, we don't call anything cilantro in the UK. It's just coriander, and coriander seeds.

I think it's going to take a while for my head to accept that cilantro is NOT a mysterious American thing.

For a long time, when I was little, I had this theory that "candy" referred to something specific. In fact (...possibly because it starts with 'ca') I sort of wanted it to refer to something like Caramac, which is a substance with the texture of chocolate and the taste of caramel.

I was bemused, and rather cheated, to discover it just meant sweets. It had this whole glamorous, exotic, American air to it. Candy.

Cilantro. It's just coriander. Huh.

tries to adjust thinking.

Now I'm wondering about why we use both words. Cilantro sounds Spanish, and it's used in lots of Mexican food, so I'm figuring that's where we got the word from, but why did we use it for only the plant and not the seed?

Well, the internet tells me that cilantro/coriander is also known as Chinese parsley, and that it was one of the first plants grown by the British colonists in the US, and that the word cilantro does in fact come from Spanish, but no information on why we kept both words.

I wonder if it's something as simple as English-speakers tending to use the seeds and Spanish-speakers using the leaves until fairly recently (within food cultures of the Americas, specifically)

Was I right about them both being called coriander in the UK? Here, we use it two ways -- grind up the seeds as a spice, and eat the plant as an herb -- and the seeds are called coriander, but the herb is cilantro. Both are coriander in the UK?

And in Australia. (To add the data point, I am not a supertaster and I can't stand coriander leaves.)