Learning new foods

Jeremy Keith (aka Adactio) had a fun quiz on his website a couple of days ago. Fonts or food? offered up 25 chances to decide whether a word was the name of a font or a food. Challenge accepted, I scored 20/25. Two foods turned out to be fonts and three fonts turned out to be foods. A fine opportunity to learn things.

Raksana turned out to be a font. I'm not sure what kind of food I thought it was. Maybe something vaguely Indonesian. It was a guess, and a wrong ’un.

Gentium is also a font and, now that I've seen it a very handsome font it is too. I can see using it. I was probably thinking of it as some kind of amaro involving gentian flowers, although to be fair Jeremy would surely have classed that as a drink rather than a food.

Among the foods, for two at least I can see where I went wrong.

Mayhaw is the fruit of a Crateagus species found in wetlands in the southern US. I knew of hawthorn, and that the haws are used to make jelly. And I knew that hawthorn is often called May, as in “Ne’er cast a clout …”. But I failed to put two and two together. That’s the mistake I feel worst about.

Dabberlocks doesn’t sound much like a font, to be sure. But to me it didn’t sound much like a food either. Turns out to be an edible seaweed. Fair enough, although two seaweeds in one list of unusual foods strikes me as one too many.

And finally, tako is the Japanese word for octopus. Nobody said anything about foreign words.