Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Just how do you pronounce 'Penne'?

An amusing incident over dinner last night:

I took my girlfriend to the restaurant on the corner of my block. It's actually the best one around for a block or three. I decide on a pasta dish, she decides on steak (shouldn't it be the other way around?!).

Anyway, the waiter comes over and I start ordering for us both in my finest Span-glish, making sure to point to all the items on the menu as I say them, lol. Now, I know the next question from him when I place my pasta order - they tried to fox me on this one last time I ordered pasta here. "What sort of pasta do you want, spaghetti, rigatoni.....PENNE?" Penne is my favourite. I order Penne. Only I pronounce it "Penn-eh".

The waiter looks at me a little strangely then corrects me: "Penn sir, of course", completes our order and walks off. At which point my little Paraguayan Angel bursts into fits of laughter, she almost has tears rolling down her cheeks.

When she finally gets her breath back she answers my cries for explanation:

As it turns out when the waiter had asked me what shape of pasta I wanted I had replied: "I want Penis".

Oops!


Check out the cookbook "Pasta" by Eric Treuille at Amazon here.

4 comments:

Perpetual_Traveller said...

P.S 'pene' is spanish for penis.

andy said...

just read your profile. greaet idea!

i wanna go travelling for a bit, and reckon i can pay my way via poker pretty easily. i just dont know how i'll cope with just 1 monitor tho...

Anonymous said...

Great blog! I'll be a pt one day.

And as Italian is per definition my mother tongue I can inform you that:

Penne is pronounced with both e:s pronounced like the e in kenny.

Perpetual_Traveller said...

Well there you go Martin84, now I am thoroughly confused!

Thanks for the clarification. I guess I should edit the post to ¨How do you pronounce Penne in Argentina?!!¨

Hope you become a PT status soon.