The eyes.
on October 23, 2019 at 12:01 amI was about this-strip-days-old when I learned that “stove eyes” is a regional term. Specifically, a term regional to where my mom grew up, whoops. I called them eyes one day and Maggie just blinked at me for six hours like I’d gone mad.
…so what are they
(idk cooking, they don’t even cover it in Shokugeki no Soma)
He’s talking about the “burners”, although with the new glasstop stoves, I’m not sure if they still call them that.
I still call them burners. I can’t find any other name online for them, either
Burners is the term for when there’s an open flame, like on a gas range. On electric stove tops they’re called elements.
How do I not know this, it doesn’t sound familiar at all, and I know loads of words 🙆
They’re all burners where I’m from. In an electric stove, the element is the piece that makes the burner hot, and depending on the design may also be the part of the burner that things sit on, but as a whole the hot part is still a burner.
Indeed. Or, to use it in a sentence, “this burner needs a new element.”
Like saying the lamp needs a new lightbulb. The burner is the hot part of the stovetop while the element is the thing that makes it work.
My southern New England suburban upbringing calls them “burners”, which isn’t even technically true for electric stoves (not that that ever stopped anyone).
After “coke, pop, soda”, does anyone have a StrangeMaps kind of reference for this moniker?
You put your hand on an electric stove, you’ll burn yourself.
Not if it’s an induction cooktop.
Yup, they’re burners.
Also you drink coffee cabinets, but not from a bubbler.
Cabinet? Bubbler?
That’s all the way over in Rhode Island talk! (For small-state folks like me, seventy miles is a long way.)
When my wife goes back to Worcester, also seventy miles, she magically gets her accent from talking with friends.
My wife’s from the south and calls them “eyes” as well. We called them “burners” in Ohio.
She thought it was a hoot when she found out that we called the horizontal surface beside a sink a “drainboard”. That one seems to be a mid-west-ism.
Originally Posted:
December 10th, 2005
….
Why yes I did download every single available strip on the old website in preparation for when I wasn’t able to visit it again….
why do you ask?
Oh thank god someone did. I kept meaning to and then getting daunted by the enormity of the task.
I did as well, although for a different reason. At the time, my internet loading times were bad enough that the effort of downloading everything to view without load times was worth it.
I just use this, it’s easier.
That’s cheating.
You’re not the hero we deserve, but you’re the one we need right now.
Or, uh, *checks calendar* the one we needed about a year ago.
Belated thanks for doing this, anyways–
The Eyes of Sauron.
The Eyes of Kenmore
I think the first time I experienced a moment like that was when I talked about arroyos by where I grew up and my friends looked at me as if I’d just grown two extra heads. Regardless of the terminology used (I think most folks would call it a gully), it takes living in a desert that gets monsoon season to be familiar with a word for “dry ditch that is where the water goes when it rains, no we don’t mean a little drainage this path we’re walking down becomes a river” in the first place.
For me, it was when a college boyfriend asked if I liked… something unpronounceable. And I was like “huh?” and he was like “you’ve never heard of @#%*$(s!?!” And then went on for days about how he couldn’t believe I’d never had them and I was like “WTF are you talking about?”
Eventually, after hearing about this way too much and getting no satisfactory explanation, I managed to work our that the garbled term was a brand name of a southern east coast (like the Virginia/Carolina area) bakery being pronounced too fast. Like saying Little Debbie so fast that it blurs together into a single gibberish word, except that it was also a more local chain which I still had never heard of even when I got the correct pronounciation – but it was basically Little Debbie. They made snack cakes.
Y’all confusing me by calling saimin “ramen”
(yeah my mom is Chinese)
I suppose I’d call them burners, though I rarely cook anything using the stove anyway.
Exactly. They’re called burners because they’ve collected so much dust that’s what happens when you turn them on.
That’s weird.
In Greece we also call them “eyes”.
In Brazil we call them “mouths”.
They are eyes. But I don’t object if they want to use an alias or two.
They’re burners, but I can see why they’d be called ‘eyes’, and it makes sense too. I may have to incorporate the term into a novel I’m writing, even though I much prefer gas stoves.
Anyone else kinda weirded out about Sal using a slogan usually uttered by people who think the wrong side lost the Civil War?
*raises hand*
**also raises hand**
It’s pretty goddamned yikes, especially since she’s half black.
It seems really out of character. Maybe that’s partially me viewing things through the lens of Dumbing of Age, where racism plays a much larger role in Sal’s arc, but regardless of whether it’s in character for this Sal it’s still a major “yikes” moment.
I’ve always called them eyes, but I’m a Tennessee native like Sal.
You’re in the heart of the region that uses the term then. “Eyes”, so far as I can tell from some minimal internet research, is a southern Appalachian appellation stretching through east Tennessee, north Georgia and north east Alabama with some minimal use in Virginia, South Carolina and Kentucky.
I’m from Texas, and everyone around here calls them “burners.” I’ve never heard of them being called “eyes” until this strip. Y’Learn something new every day.
I’m used to calling it the hob (I’m in the UK)
Yep. Also “rings” here in the nothernest bit of mainland Britain (och aye!) The gas ones are “gas rings”, which honestly makes more sense than the electric rings, which weren’t exactly-ring shaped even when they were exposed glowy things, and are even less so now they’re ceramic disks.
Rings here in Northern Ireland too. Especially fitting for the old spiral shaped ones.
I’d call the whole stove top a hob and the individual elements the ring. Even the ceramic one I have glows red in a ring shape.
“Eyes” for burners is a new one on me, and I’ve lived in the South for all but eight months of my life. Is it an inland thing? ‘Cause I mostly lived near port cities…
I’ve always heard them called “burners”. I’m from Indiana, which is a southern state in most senses other than the purely geographic.
That must be really regional because I was born in Marian, Indiana (Live in Mississippi now) and I’ve never heard anyone in my family call them Eyes.
How did Sal know that with “The what?”, he was asking about “the eyes” and not “the auxillary stove”?
(Btw., I, like apparently this comic, thought the word was spelled “auxillary”, but my spell checker insists on “auxiliary”. Or are those two different words altogether?)
prob like how people don’t pronounce the first R in February
Sal, I’m pretty sure you really don’t want the South to rise again.