Thursday, June 17, 2010

The Gender of Beverage

Most of the languages I'm familiar with besides English assign genders to nouns. Things will be masculine or feminine, and you'll have to match your verb to the noun's gender. Outside of words that literally pertain to genders (words like man, woman, girl, boy) gender designations are seemingly random. For example, 'door' in French is feminine, and 'taco' in Spanish is masculine. In the course of my own English speaking, I try not to assign genders to beverages. It'd be easy to way that wine coolers are feminine while whiskey is masculine, but what about the mimosa? Sure, it's a little dainty, but for people who consider Bloody Marys are the consistency of vomit (which they may have been trying to choke down all morning), it's the only option. I try not to judge.

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