I propose that the traditional feast for TLAPD involves initials of a sort itself: BBQ. Here’s why, in the vein of my Unfortunate English: The Gloomy Truth Behind the Words You Use:

Which of the following is most notorious in the world of piracy: The pirate Blackbeard? Or the buccaneer Redmeat?

Redmeat is neither pirate nor buccaneer, of course. I’m referring to the artery-clogging red meat, the eating of which is in some circles both politically and gastronically incorrect. Before Blackbeard was spilling the blood of his victims from 1713 to 1718, the buccaneers were spilling the blood of wild red-meat oxen and wild the-other-white-meat boars in the Caribbean. And dining well. Caribbean natives used wood (and later metal) frameworks for various purposes, among them sleeping (to avoid snakes) and curing and roasting meat. Speakers of the native Carribbean language Tupi called such a framework a mukem. French explorers adapted the word as boucan, and people who used them to cook on were boucaniers. (Native Haitians used similar frameworks, which in the language Taino were called babricots. The Spanish adopted this word as barbacoa, which led to our word barbecue.)

The boucaniers moved from redmeatish pursuits to Blackbeardish pursuits, and were known by the late 1600s in English as buccaneers. Did they consult their food pyramids before all that pillaging?

For more information on the source of the word barbecue that will hurt your head even more than a grog hangover, consult my previous post on the topic, matey.

In a recent review of Iron Man (pretty good flick, by the way), we spot:

. . . the film’s big finale feels more like a requisite mano y mano showdown that never lives up to everything preceding it.

I kinda agree with the evaluation of the big action scene. But as the author of Everything You Know About English Is Wrong, I must also point out that everything you know about Spanish is wrong. The phrase is actually mano a mano, as “y” is Spanish for “and.” So mano y mano means not “man to man,” but “man and man.”

No it doesn’t. It means “hand and hand,” as mano is Spanish for “hand,” not “man,” despite the phrase’s frequent use to mean “man to man” (I’m not sure of the author’s intended meaning in this quoted case, though). Mano traces back to Latin manus, which has given us such English words as manipulate (”handle by hand”), manufacture (”create by hand”) and “man-oh-man!” (”slap hand to forehead”). Just kidding about the last one.

By the by, urbandictionary.com notes about the misuse of this phrase:

Other variants include “mono y mono”, Spanish for
monkey and monkey = malapropism el mejor

So, we have a double misconception here. Or perhaps a triple one. After all, this flick is Iron Man—and not Iron Hand, and definitely not Iron Monkey, which is itself a darn good martial arts flick—about a superhero in a robot suit fighting a villain in a robot suit. Shouldn’t the phrase be “machino a machino”?

* “Soy Iron Mano”: Spanish for “I Am Iron Hand,” not sung by Black Sabbath.