Week 8 - Post 2: Gastronomist

This tells better as a story.  I promise to have all of the required parts and to never use this format again, but please allow me to tell you how I learned this word in a story.  And please don't judge me for my love of food.

It has been an incredibly tough week, and today is Friday.  I have a planning period at the end of the day and I usually have a snack and grade papers or organize for the next lesson or whatever.  But this week has been a tough week.  And so instead of planning, I went onto the internet and looked at pictures of food.  It's very calming.  As I was scrolling along, I starting thinking about Baked Alaska.  Don't ask me how it popped into my head, I don't know.  Maybe it's because I watched the Mythbuster's Alaska Special last night.  But the more I thought about it, the more I couldn't decide if it was fish or ice cream.  Or fish with ice cream.  So I went to Wikipedia.org and checked out Baked Alaska.  So technically, I could have picked Baked Alaska for my word, but I did know a little bit about it (it is ice cream by the way) and that is not the moral of my story.

As I was reading about Baked Alaska, I saw this: In 1969, the recently invented microwave oven enabled Hungarian physicist and molecular gastronomist Nicholas Kurti to produce a reverse Baked Alaska (also called a "Frozen Florida")—a frozen shell of meringue filled with hot liquor

Gastronomist?!  As soon as I read the word, I knew what it meant.  The Great University of They had come up with a name for people who study food.  Like an economist of the gastrointestinal system.  And Merriam Webster online dictionary proves it. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? 

I love words.  But in this moment, I am in love with how everything has a name.  Just to satisfy my point:

• "interrobang" - the name of the "?!" mark at the end of a rhetorical question
• "tittle" - the point over a lower case "i" or "j" (or a small amount)
• And this, all of this: John Greene on Mental Floss