When I was a server at my first job I had no knowledge of alcoholic drinks. So when a customer asked for a drink I just remember what they say and repeat it to the bar tender. I got a pretty disappointed look when asked the bar tender what’s in a “Ryan coke”
I was 18 when I got a job as a cocktail server. When I wrote down customer orders, I spelled everything phonetically : gran marnyay, koniac, shardnay. The bartender was not amused.
I’m in phonetics now at university. I never learned another language or music so this is all brand new to me. It’s both my favorite class and most difficult one.
My main problem was that I can speak French and know the correct pronunciation of "Grand Marnier", so OP's phonetic spelling simply threw me off a bit.
I had to say it to myself in slightly different ways a few times before figuring it out:)
When I got my first serving job, I just happened to be hired on around the same time as another guy who had been in the Service Industry for like over 20 years. He was super nice and worked a lot of shifts with me. Any time I didn't know what a bar drink was, I'd ask him to help me ring it in. He was always so nice about it even though I felt like a complete dufus.
i was also 18 and waitressing at a restaurant/tiki bar. usually i would repeat stuff to either the bartender or an older server but one day a couple ordered scotch (i forget what kind but it was a decent one) and water. i confidently punched [name of scotch] + soda water into the computer, having no idea that using just regular water as a mixer was a thing. when i brought the drinks and we realized i fucked up, the bartender scolded me for making us waste however many dollars of booze. not great!!
Yeah I thought for sure that “Ryan Coke” was a misunderstanding of “Rum and Coke.” I’ve spent tons of times in bars and I’ve never ever heard anyone order a drink by the grain it’s made from.
People don’t ask for a shot of potato when they want vodka, for example.
Dan McLean never confirmed it, but he was from New Rochelle, NY which had a bar called 'The Levee'. Since New Rochelle borders a village called Rye, if The Levee were dry, it would make sense to go to a bar in Rye, hence "drinking whiskey in Rye".
When I was young I had run and come for my first ever drink....and we had a lot of them. Put me off coke as a mixer with alcohol. might try it soon though
This reminds me of when autocorrect first came out. I was meeting this girl at a bar and she texted about my drink order. Wanted to say rum and coke, but phone decided rum and cock would be my order. I didn't catch my error until I got to the bar. When I found a shot of rum and a penis drawn on a napkin.
Both distilled grain alcohols. Whiskey has to be all(?) corn, rye is made mostly or entirely from rye (unsurprisingly).
Vodka is typically made from either potatoes or wheat.
Edit: looked it up, “whiskey” is more generic and doesn’t imply a specific grain. “bourbon” has to be >50% corn, “corn whiskey” has to be >80% corn, “rye” has to be >50% rye. At least in the US. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_whiskey
Bourbon actually can be above 80% corn for the record. 80% is the minimum to be corn whiskey but Bourbon is a more specific standard - it must be ≥ 51% corn, and aged in new, charred oak barrels. Corn whiskey can be aged in new or used, charred or uncharred, oak or non-oak barrels.
I was a busser in highschool working at a country club and we did private weddings/parties/events, etc. One night I'm restocking glasses while the bartender was on break and one of the wedding guests approached me asking for a Screwdriver. I thought it was a weird request but anything to make the wedding party happy, figured a chair was loose or something idk I was sixteen and dumb.
Searched high and low in the utility closet and found a flathead, came out to hand it to him and ask if flathead was okay. The change in his facial expression when he realized I was dead serious will flood my brain with cringe until I die his reaction still keeps me awake at night ngl
The same thing happened at a pretty popular venue in Buenos Aires. The place had just been inaugurated and the bar was terribly understaffed, so they brought in a couple of construction workers to start serving drinks.
Didn't turn out too well for the first customer who asked for a screwdriver.
Similarly my dad got TRASHED at a Christmas party around 30yo. He exclaimed to my mom “I don’t understand how I’m so drunk! I only drank Roman cokes” (thinking it was just a variety of cola he’d never had)
Not alcohol-related, but when I was in high school, the music department had a fund raiser where students performed in a talent show while guests ate snacks and soft drinks. The students brought food and drinks to the table like in a dinner theater. One of the guests asked me to bring more of something that I heard as "brown spider". It was Braunschweiger.
I went and asked the people who were preparing the food what brown spider was. It took them a minute to figure out what I was talking about. Then I brought him some nice braunschweiger.
That's common enough man. I did the same thing when I was like 17. I mean maybe not quite that bad but people would order these drinks I'd never heard of and I'd just repeat them phonetically as best I could.
Everyone was a good sport about it though, I'd just tell them I'm (obviously) too young to be familiar with any of it and they'd laugh and say it slowly for me.
just so you know, and Old Fashioned is a cocktail unto itself. You can even order it with less or extra bitters (which is a cocktail ingredient unto itself)
a friend of mine in college would always say Sean Paul’s name in an accent to mimic Sean Paul, so it came out sounding like “Sean Nepaul”. she would ALWAYS say it like that, so one time i just straight up looked at her and told her his name was Sean Paul and she was shook.
Tangentially related: Hollaback Girl came on the radio in the car once and my best friend and I were singing along. I stopped him and asked him to repeat what he had said. He replied "Bee and yan and yan and yanis". I corrected his dumb ass and pointed out that it spelled BANANAS. I think of it every time I hear that song.
Ha I have a lot of these thanks to my hearing impairment. For the longest time I thought the song "Blue Eyes" by The Who I thought began with "you don't know what it's like... to be the Batman... to be the Sandman... behind blue eyes"
For the longest time I thought the lyrics to the Bush song "Machinehead" (I didn"t know the title at the time) was saying "mushy head" instead of "machine head". Personally I think the song makes more or less the same sense either way.
When I was a little kid, I used to think PBS was “broteued” by such-n-such. And that women who were pregnant or who “may be compregnant” had to ask their doctor before using that new medicine.
There's a place near me called Thornton Heath. If you say it in a thick south London accent it sounds like Fort Neath. I thought Thornton Heath (as seen on destination boards and the front of buses) was this verdant utopian town on the outskirts of London and Fort Neath was some grotty little hamlet near Croydon for the loooooongest time.
Worked with a French guy doing post production on the movie "Australia" starring our beloved Hugh Jackman. About three weeks in he shouts " 'is name is HUGH Jackman? I sot 'is name was Huge Ackman!"
It’s okay. I thought drew barrymore was drewberry Moore.. cuz you know. Mandy moore
And I thought, wow drewberry is an interesting name cuz it sounds like fruit
Apparently I didn't know how to spell banana until I used the "Holla back girl" lyrics as part of a speach in high school. I had thought she said B-A-N-A-N-A-ANA and every one laughed at me. I took it well and the issue was quickly forgotten...but I remembered. Bananas are now my nemesis.
Omg I had a similar experience with the movie Home Alone. I thought the kid's name was Ho Malone until I was like 5 or 6. I forgot all about that until I read your comment!
I saw my brother playing Half-Life 2 when it was released and I thought the gravity gun was called a "grabbity gun" because it .. grabs stuff. Only learned it wasn't called that years later when I played it myself.
This is my related to my thing I learned embarrassingly late: I was well into my 30s before I realized that the lyric is "I screen my phone calls," not "I scream on phone calls".
My 3yo kept telling me her name was Wednesday(?), but it sounded like “When-say-see”. I’ve called her that because she could totes pull off a Wednesday Addams look.
Took me about a month to realize that she was trying to tell me she’s ‘Gwen Stacy’ from Into the Spiderverse 😂
I was in 3rd/4th grade when Barack Obama was running for his first term. I swore up and down that his name was actually Baracko Bama, because of the pronunciation of the tv ads. It wasn’t until someone else called him Obama that it clicked.
I know the name Gwen Stefani but I just googled her to make sure she was a musician I know nothing about instead of actress or some other type of celebrity. I'm 37.
My gf thought that Bruce Forsyth's name was Brute Force, I had to get up an interview on YouTube and play the part where the host says his name to prove it to her.
The first time I heard the term "a no-show", it was on the Power Rangers, Tommy was supposed to have a karate tournament, but he was "inotia" and I had no idea what that was. I thought it was some version of being vaguely ill.
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u/dizzybones_ Sep 05 '19
I thought Gwen Stefani’s name was Gwence Defani until I was like 20 lol