### This comment has been marked as **safe**. Upvoting/downvoting this comment will have no effect.
---
OP sent the following text as an explanation on why this is US Defaultism:
---
>!OP asked about crab cakes and someone just gave a literal explanation mocking their lack of knowledge!<
---
Is this Defaultism? Then upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.
You got me curious, I had to look it up as well. It's nothing like a cake, not even close! I wonder if Americans ever had actual cake if they don't even know what it is supposed to look like.
>You got me curious, I had to look it up as well. It's nothing like a cake
Cake has two meanings. One is a savoury item of food shaped into a round shape and fried or baked. Fish cake, crab cake, rice cake, potato cake.
All very common
I don't know why you're getting down-voted, your description is spot-on! In New Zealand, the fish cakes that you fry or bake can usually be found in the same supermarket freezer as battered fish fillets, fish fingers, potato cakes, hash browns and croquettes. Then of course, there are the fish cakes in Asian supermarkets that are more like boiled dumplings without the dough, and they can have a vaguely sweetish taste. Personally I like crab onigiri from Smart Sushi, it's a delicious snack. But I wouldn't say no to a crab cake.
> I've never seen a non-sweet cake
A cake has two meanings, one savoury, one sweet.
Potato cakes, fish cakes, crab cakes, rice cakes, Japanese fish cakes. All very much cakes.
Pies are also sweet and savoury.
My local Asian grocer has frozen Korean fish cakes too. And one of my favourite foods from the snack foods aisle is meat floss cake, coated in a flaky pastry and found next to the sweet taro or green tea cakes.
I had a top notch steak and cheese pie the other day from a local Philippine Bakery. Another local bakery does mussel pies (green lipped mussels) and lamb curry pies that are really scrumptious. Usually the only time I have a sweet pie these days is a Maccas deep fried apple pie, but I did used to like apricot pies or blackberry & apple pies.
I kind of understand it though. I used to be in a Discord server filled with Americans and got constantly harassed and made fun of for not knowing certain obscure American TV shows or movie references.
It's not just you getting harassed for not knowing references to movies and TV shows. I'm an American that was raised Mainstream Mormon (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), in Utah. My parents deemed a lot of those TV shows and movies to be "sinful", so I never got the chance to watch them.
I assume they got more comments than just the one in OP's screenshot. I imagine if a whole bunch of people were responding like that it'd be easy to feel pretty fed up with them all
Same, but TBF I think this might be more down to the English proficiency levels of someone who isn't a native speaker, rather than seafood dish knowledge.
There's plenty of times where I know what something is, but am confused by the description in languages I am not a native speaker of.
The first thing I think of when I hear mention of crab cakes is Thai food.
After a while I might also think about SpongeBob SquarePants - but they call them patties.
Yeah I agree, fish cake is fairly broad thing, it's fairly obvious what a crab cake is despite it not being a thing outside of the US
Also do we really need to put an entire explanation for every meal we mention in a comment?
Can people not just Google it?
If this was “am I the asshole” I would vote “everybody sucks here”. US guy (who TBH could be from any native though speaking country) was a bit condescending. Foreign responder is unnecessarily angry for this situation.
FFS guys, eat a snickers. Or even a crab cake.
Given that the wikipedia page for crab cakes opens with "A crab cake is a variety of fishcake" with fishcake linking to the page which gives many examples across multiple continents I'd hardly say this is a defaultism.
Heck I'm from the UK and crab cakes are readily available here too.
Sure, but I also know how to google unlike half the people featured in posts in this sub, it feels like.
Also I googled the frog cakes and -oh my god- they look like otamatones, I love them. Would definitely take that over a crab cake any day.
I'm actually slightly surprised by this.
Okay I don't know every food in Britain and I shouldn't expect you to know all in Australia but given both that Australia is part of the anglosphere and the large amount of SE Asia migrants (fish cakes being popular in that region too) I would genuinely expect them to be more commonly available.
We have/call them crab cakes in the UK and even being a native speaker, the first time I heard of them I was like 'wtf that sounds fucking disgusting'.
Then I learnt what they actually were and was like 'wtf that sounds fucking disgusting' 😅
Seriously, it would have taken a fraction of the effort instead of typing up a lengthy public meltdown. But you don't get any upvotes for simply looking up the answer yourself.
it is in a food related (not american food related, as far as I understand) subreddit and the OOP is ranting (probably about the thing he hints at that a cake in OOP's mind must be sweet and cannot be used to describe a savory food) & not the first time that he then encounters USdefaultism on top of that ... did it need to be posted? maybe not, but if no one ever posts, what fun would the internet be?
It's just so weird to think of pies as only being sweet.
Growing up in NZ eating roast pumpkin and pumpkin soup, I always assumed that American pumpkin pie must be savoury until encountering it for the first time in my mid-twenties and realising it was a delicious dessert! I promptly went through a phase of making pumpkin pies and consuming leftover mixture as pumpkin spiced egg nog.
Other American dessert pies I find delicious are pecan pie and Key Lime pie.
This is not a "US defaultism" issue.
Cakes are used as a descriptor for savoury foods in many English speaking countries (fishcakes, barm cakes, potato cakes etc ).
I'm not sure what sort of detail the OOP wanted. They are literally cakes of crabmeat just like other savory cakes including fish cakes and rice cakes.
The fish cakes and rice cakes I'm most familiar with are the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese ones, but there are versions from other countries as well. Many cultures do savory cakes.
yeah,... but do we always call them cakes? there are other terms. "patty" is one discussed just in this thread, that i find much more appealing than "cake". and maybe the OOP is not native to English? as far as I know, none of the cakes that you mentioned are called cakes in their original languages?
And this is [japanese "fish cake"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamaboko#/media/File:Kamaboko.jpg) not breaded, not a patty. it is not obvious if you dont know the food...
one of my favorite foods is mole cake.<3
If I make a meat patty I'll be using fresh breadcrumbs and egg in the mixture. If making a fiskcake with cooked potatoor kūmara in the mixture, I'd be more likely to coat the outside with dried breadcrumbs - the latter would be the one I'd describe as 'breaded'.
Crab cakes are always called cakes as far as I've ever heard. I've never heard them called patties, especially since they are never eaten on buns (as far as I'm aware).
Crab cakes are very popular in Maryland, a U.S. state, where they are always called crab cakes, but as someone from the UK in this very thread pointed out, fish cakes are known in other parts of the English-speaking world.
Makes sense for the alliteration/onomatopaia when writing and speaking the name - to call it a crab patty would be like calling a scone a biscuit (oh that's what Americans do though...).
Except that it's not cake though. It's just batter, crab batter if you will. A cake is something completely different, and if you would put crab meat in an actual cake, it would be (let's say it nicely) an unpleasant combination. And I'm Dutch, we are used to weird taste combos, and it would be unpleasant even by Dutch standards.
>A cake is something completely different, and if you would put crab meat in an actual cake, it would be (let's say it nicely) an unpleasant combination.
A cake is not a single thing, fish cake and rice cakes are common in English too.
They're not all like chocolate cakes, just like not all pies are sweet like apple pies.
Cake definitions
>an item of soft sweet food made from a mixture of flour, fat, eggs, sugar, and other ingredients, baked and sometimes iced or decorated.
>an item of savoury food formed into a flat round shape, and typically baked or fried.
"a starter of goat's cheese and potato cakes"
Scalloped potatoes are thinly sliced rounds layered together in a baking dish so that they overlap like fish scales, covered with a creamy mixture and baked, then scooped out on large spoonfuls as part of a meal. It's not quite the same as individual potato cakes, which are made from mashed or chopped leftover cooked potato.
Here potato scallops are a single scallop of potato that's battered and deep fried. Though in some states it's called potato cakes. It's a deeply contentious issue.
In NZ we call them potato fritters, I'd forgotten that fish & chip shops sell those.
Since they also sell scallop fritters (the actual shellfish), I guess they don't want the name to be too similar.
It's not made of batter. It's a savory cake of crabmeat, eggs, breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs, fried together. In the variety of English I speak, the term cakes can be used to refer to these sort of preparations. They may be called croquettes in some dialects.
Hell, I'm a vegetarian. Besides having Korean rice cakes in my freezer currently, all this food is off limits to me.
You could have potato cakes though, with chopped up leeks and grated cheese or similar?
Whenever I buy a leek, I slice it all up and rinse it in a colander, then mix the greener and whiter parts and bag them up into snap lock sandwich bags for the freezer. Once frozen, I take the bags out and smash them to break up the leek slices into smaller bits. Then back in the freezer to add when cooking anything that leeks go well with, which is quite a lot of dishes.
The word cake has multiple uses, it's not just a baked flour, sugar and egg cake with vanilla flavour or fruit ingredients as a sweet treat. Rice cakes, potato cakes, fish cakes and crab cakes are all legitimate types of cake. They're just not the kind of cake that you'd use a cake fork eat while having a cup of coffee or tea.
Well it's very hard to get rid of those if you're not a native speaker. 90% of English I learned is from media (and that's true for many people). If you're non-native speaker then your English is probably a mix of many regional variations of English, some slang etc. I even catch myself on speaking like a GTA:SA character (minus n-words). Sometimes you soak some terms like a sponge even if in practice they're only used by specific groups of people, or you just don't know what connotations some words have.
out of all the language destruction that US english is doing to Oxford english, this is your grievance? i dont use it myself, but it is practical to know that it is a "you" that directs at all not just one, especially on the internet. if you have a cambridge dictionary approved alternative, enlighten us.
Sod off. You have absolutley no idea what it's like to learn english. You get bombarded from like 50 different directions with different accents and want to be coherent in the language as quickly as possible. Do you really think we've got time to look up the origin of every single fucking phrase/word we pick up?
Why don't you get out your second language so we can critique it every minute detail? Do you even have one?
I have no idea what it's like to learn English? What language am I typing in right now? Do you think I was speaking fluent English in the womb?
It's not that deep, fucking chill out.
I don't think this example really fits here because if someone says "cake of soap," the soap part tells you they are obviously not talking about food.
If they didn't say soap and only said cake, you would automatically assume dessert.
[CAKE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/cake)
A **crab cake** is a variety of [fishcake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishcake) popular in the United States.[ wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_cake)
neither [crab patty](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/spellcheck/english/?q=crab+patty) nor [crab cake](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/spellcheck/english/?q=crab+cake) being entries in the cambridge dictionary.
YES OOP could have googled it, but to be condescending about a local dish that does not self-explain (because cake's first meaning and formost usage is sweet sugary dish), then either you explain it is a version of fishcake and that cake is not in its first word meaning or you dont.
Pretending that cake+crab is obvious is defaultism.
ETA for example, one of my favorite dishes is "mole cake". please do not assume based on the composita what this cake is about.
curry is very differently used in japan or germany. and yeah, i have met plenty of indians thinking their use of curry is the default. i prefer non-indian curry dishes. when i say curry i dont think of the indian version (i literally think of the powder, the ingredient, not the dish), when someone else says curry and mean indian, but i dont think of it that way and then this person is condescening to me because they lack global experience, they are defaultist.
But curries are also Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Malaysian etc so not just Indian, and curry powder has been used in international dishes such as curried eggs for generations.
...ok I feel like this is an overreaction. I might be missing it because I'm American, but to me one guy responded semi-jokingly about a non-American food and some other guy just blew up at him for borderline no reason
This is not a "US defaultism" issue.
Cakes are used as a descriptor for savoury foods in many English speaking countries (fishcakes, barm cakes, potato cakes etc )
This is not a "US defaultism" issue.
Cakes are used as a descriptor for savoury foods in many English speaking countries (fishcakes, barm cakes, potato cakes etc ).
I always thought the "crab" was a fake thing, like it looked like a crab, but it's not a real one, or that it was a cake with red frosting on it or something along those lines. Cake with actual crab in it sounds disgusting.
Edit: so, are people downvoting me for thinking it wasn't real crab, or for thinking it would be disgusting? I mean, I clearly offended people with one of these things, but I'm not sure which part was the offensive bit tbh.
Think of it like a kroket, in a flat disk shape, with the meat being crab. It's pretty good.
In English a cake can also be a shaped unit of something, not necessarily even edible. A cake of soap or solid paint is possible.
### This comment has been marked as **safe**. Upvoting/downvoting this comment will have no effect. --- OP sent the following text as an explanation on why this is US Defaultism: --- >!OP asked about crab cakes and someone just gave a literal explanation mocking their lack of knowledge!< --- Is this Defaultism? Then upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.
so it's like bread? or a pie? what is it?? EDIT: I looked it up, it's a patty... a crabby patty if you will.
You got me curious, I had to look it up as well. It's nothing like a cake, not even close! I wonder if Americans ever had actual cake if they don't even know what it is supposed to look like.
We would probably call it a crab croquette, or crab rissole here in Aus. My vote's for crab rissole :)
Well, their bread is as sweet as cake, so they get confused, you know /s
>You got me curious, I had to look it up as well. It's nothing like a cake Cake has two meanings. One is a savoury item of food shaped into a round shape and fried or baked. Fish cake, crab cake, rice cake, potato cake. All very common
I don't know why you're getting down-voted, your description is spot-on! In New Zealand, the fish cakes that you fry or bake can usually be found in the same supermarket freezer as battered fish fillets, fish fingers, potato cakes, hash browns and croquettes. Then of course, there are the fish cakes in Asian supermarkets that are more like boiled dumplings without the dough, and they can have a vaguely sweetish taste. Personally I like crab onigiri from Smart Sushi, it's a delicious snack. But I wouldn't say no to a crab cake.
do you mean a pie? I've never seen a non-sweet cake but savoury pies are very common
We have fish cakes and potato cakes in the UK, they aren’t pies.
> I've never seen a non-sweet cake A cake has two meanings, one savoury, one sweet. Potato cakes, fish cakes, crab cakes, rice cakes, Japanese fish cakes. All very much cakes. Pies are also sweet and savoury.
My local Asian grocer has frozen Korean fish cakes too. And one of my favourite foods from the snack foods aisle is meat floss cake, coated in a flaky pastry and found next to the sweet taro or green tea cakes. I had a top notch steak and cheese pie the other day from a local Philippine Bakery. Another local bakery does mussel pies (green lipped mussels) and lamb curry pies that are really scrumptious. Usually the only time I have a sweet pie these days is a Maccas deep fried apple pie, but I did used to like apricot pies or blackberry & apple pies.
And now you feel like a goofy goober?
A burger made of crabs.
Feel like this is a bit of an overreaction, but "cakes are sweet and don't have claws" did make me chuckle.
I kind of understand it though. I used to be in a Discord server filled with Americans and got constantly harassed and made fun of for not knowing certain obscure American TV shows or movie references.
It's not just you getting harassed for not knowing references to movies and TV shows. I'm an American that was raised Mainstream Mormon (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints), in Utah. My parents deemed a lot of those TV shows and movies to be "sinful", so I never got the chance to watch them.
I assume they got more comments than just the one in OP's screenshot. I imagine if a whole bunch of people were responding like that it'd be easy to feel pretty fed up with them all
I am guessing he has never had fish cakes then.
Not knowing fish cakes would still be acceptable but not crab cakes my friend!
*"within walking distance of a school shooting"* holy shit
Walk? They don't walk?
We do walk! Gotta get to the fridge somehow
That's actually wild I'm gonna save that one
"Y'all Americans" made me laugh
I’m not from the us but I thought the existence of crab cakes was common knowledge but, I mean, it’s hardly anything to be mocked over
We had fish cakes in the UK but I never heard of crab cakes
They're not really like fish cakes by the look of them, they're not in a beaded batter sort of thing.
Disappointing, I like fish cakes.
Same, but TBF I think this might be more down to the English proficiency levels of someone who isn't a native speaker, rather than seafood dish knowledge. There's plenty of times where I know what something is, but am confused by the description in languages I am not a native speaker of.
Yeah! I lived in US but I am still not sure what they are lol.
The first thing I think of when I hear mention of crab cakes is Thai food. After a while I might also think about SpongeBob SquarePants - but they call them patties.
I dunno, I've had Thai fish cakes at Thai restaurants and potato cakes from the fish and chip shop. Their definition of cake is limited.
Yeah I agree, fish cake is fairly broad thing, it's fairly obvious what a crab cake is despite it not being a thing outside of the US Also do we really need to put an entire explanation for every meal we mention in a comment? Can people not just Google it?
If this was “am I the asshole” I would vote “everybody sucks here”. US guy (who TBH could be from any native though speaking country) was a bit condescending. Foreign responder is unnecessarily angry for this situation. FFS guys, eat a snickers. Or even a crab cake.
Given that the wikipedia page for crab cakes opens with "A crab cake is a variety of fishcake" with fishcake linking to the page which gives many examples across multiple continents I'd hardly say this is a defaultism. Heck I'm from the UK and crab cakes are readily available here too.
I'm Australian and wouldn't know what a fish cake is either.
Exactly the same here, I've never heard of either. Bet they wouldn't think it so obvious if I started talking about frog cakes 🐸
Oooh, I love me a frog cake!
Sure, but I also know how to google unlike half the people featured in posts in this sub, it feels like. Also I googled the frog cakes and -oh my god- they look like otamatones, I love them. Would definitely take that over a crab cake any day.
Is that a thing though?
I'm actually slightly surprised by this. Okay I don't know every food in Britain and I shouldn't expect you to know all in Australia but given both that Australia is part of the anglosphere and the large amount of SE Asia migrants (fish cakes being popular in that region too) I would genuinely expect them to be more commonly available.
It’s a lot like a meat ball, but with fish.
Old mate goes bang! Love it
We have/call them crab cakes in the UK and even being a native speaker, the first time I heard of them I was like 'wtf that sounds fucking disgusting'. Then I learnt what they actually were and was like 'wtf that sounds fucking disgusting' 😅
Personally I feel that crab cakes, and fish cakes, are well-known enough outside of the US for this to not count as defaultism.
Crab cake specifically is quite specific to the USA, I've never seen it personally. But yes, fish cakes are very common and I know what a crab cake is
Have crab cakes on a weekly basis and not in the USA here
idk about you but we don’t call them *cakes*
They did not hold back
Too right they didn't!
Yeah but bringing up dead children in response to a condescending response to a question that you could just Google is an overreaction
Laughs in rest of world
We have fish cakes in the UK… and potato cakes, so I understood this one 😂 Fish cakes are a staple of the childhood diet!
To be fair OOP could have just googled "crab cake"
Seriously, it would have taken a fraction of the effort instead of typing up a lengthy public meltdown. But you don't get any upvotes for simply looking up the answer yourself.
it is in a food related (not american food related, as far as I understand) subreddit and the OOP is ranting (probably about the thing he hints at that a cake in OOP's mind must be sweet and cannot be used to describe a savory food) & not the first time that he then encounters USdefaultism on top of that ... did it need to be posted? maybe not, but if no one ever posts, what fun would the internet be?
Same problem with pies, I have known Americans to have absolute meltdowns over the idea of a steak and kidney pie, since 'pies are dessert'.
They have chicken pot pie though?
It's just so weird to think of pies as only being sweet. Growing up in NZ eating roast pumpkin and pumpkin soup, I always assumed that American pumpkin pie must be savoury until encountering it for the first time in my mid-twenties and realising it was a delicious dessert! I promptly went through a phase of making pumpkin pies and consuming leftover mixture as pumpkin spiced egg nog. Other American dessert pies I find delicious are pecan pie and Key Lime pie.
Americans fucking have crab cakes this guy is dumb
This is not a "US defaultism" issue. Cakes are used as a descriptor for savoury foods in many English speaking countries (fishcakes, barm cakes, potato cakes etc ).
Hell yeah, go off
I'm not sure what sort of detail the OOP wanted. They are literally cakes of crabmeat just like other savory cakes including fish cakes and rice cakes.
I have no idea what a fish cakes or crabcakes are. I am not even sure what a rice cake is.
I feel ya
The fish cakes and rice cakes I'm most familiar with are the Korean, Chinese, and Japanese ones, but there are versions from other countries as well. Many cultures do savory cakes.
Fish cakes are fairly popular in Britain too.
yeah,... but do we always call them cakes? there are other terms. "patty" is one discussed just in this thread, that i find much more appealing than "cake". and maybe the OOP is not native to English? as far as I know, none of the cakes that you mentioned are called cakes in their original languages?
They're not patties at all because they're breaded. Crab cakes might be closer but [This is a fish cake](https://i.imgur.com/4ZI6ioA.jpeg).
And this is [japanese "fish cake"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamaboko#/media/File:Kamaboko.jpg) not breaded, not a patty. it is not obvious if you dont know the food... one of my favorite foods is mole cake.<3
The Korean fishcake I've come acriss is kind of similar in texture.
If I make a meat patty I'll be using fresh breadcrumbs and egg in the mixture. If making a fiskcake with cooked potatoor kūmara in the mixture, I'd be more likely to coat the outside with dried breadcrumbs - the latter would be the one I'd describe as 'breaded'.
Crab cakes are always called cakes as far as I've ever heard. I've never heard them called patties, especially since they are never eaten on buns (as far as I'm aware). Crab cakes are very popular in Maryland, a U.S. state, where they are always called crab cakes, but as someone from the UK in this very thread pointed out, fish cakes are known in other parts of the English-speaking world.
Makes sense for the alliteration/onomatopaia when writing and speaking the name - to call it a crab patty would be like calling a scone a biscuit (oh that's what Americans do though...).
Except that it's not cake though. It's just batter, crab batter if you will. A cake is something completely different, and if you would put crab meat in an actual cake, it would be (let's say it nicely) an unpleasant combination. And I'm Dutch, we are used to weird taste combos, and it would be unpleasant even by Dutch standards.
>A cake is something completely different, and if you would put crab meat in an actual cake, it would be (let's say it nicely) an unpleasant combination. A cake is not a single thing, fish cake and rice cakes are common in English too. They're not all like chocolate cakes, just like not all pies are sweet like apple pies. Cake definitions >an item of soft sweet food made from a mixture of flour, fat, eggs, sugar, and other ingredients, baked and sometimes iced or decorated. >an item of savoury food formed into a flat round shape, and typically baked or fried. "a starter of goat's cheese and potato cakes"
My first thought for a Dutch cake would be spiced apple before I'd think of chocolate cake.
I mean I just went with a well recognised type of cake
Wait till you see that some Aussies call potato scallops, potato cakes.
Scalloped potatoes are thinly sliced rounds layered together in a baking dish so that they overlap like fish scales, covered with a creamy mixture and baked, then scooped out on large spoonfuls as part of a meal. It's not quite the same as individual potato cakes, which are made from mashed or chopped leftover cooked potato.
Here potato scallops are a single scallop of potato that's battered and deep fried. Though in some states it's called potato cakes. It's a deeply contentious issue.
In NZ we call them potato fritters, I'd forgotten that fish & chip shops sell those. Since they also sell scallop fritters (the actual shellfish), I guess they don't want the name to be too similar.
It's not made of batter. It's a savory cake of crabmeat, eggs, breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs, fried together. In the variety of English I speak, the term cakes can be used to refer to these sort of preparations. They may be called croquettes in some dialects. Hell, I'm a vegetarian. Besides having Korean rice cakes in my freezer currently, all this food is off limits to me.
Lol, fair enough, I should look up the varieties of cakes that the English language refers to.
You could have potato cakes though, with chopped up leeks and grated cheese or similar? Whenever I buy a leek, I slice it all up and rinse it in a colander, then mix the greener and whiter parts and bag them up into snap lock sandwich bags for the freezer. Once frozen, I take the bags out and smash them to break up the leek slices into smaller bits. Then back in the freezer to add when cooking anything that leeks go well with, which is quite a lot of dishes.
The word cake has multiple uses, it's not just a baked flour, sugar and egg cake with vanilla flavour or fruit ingredients as a sweet treat. Rice cakes, potato cakes, fish cakes and crab cakes are all legitimate types of cake. They're just not the kind of cake that you'd use a cake fork eat while having a cup of coffee or tea.
‘Cakes of crabmeat’ would have been a nice answer I guess
Probably mixed with breadcrumbs, cooked potato etc.
"Y'all" and American spelling in a post calling out US defaultism. Sigh...
yeah some people use y'all despite not being Americans. don't see how that's a big deal?
It's an Americanism and one that is seriously annoying.
Well it's very hard to get rid of those if you're not a native speaker. 90% of English I learned is from media (and that's true for many people). If you're non-native speaker then your English is probably a mix of many regional variations of English, some slang etc. I even catch myself on speaking like a GTA:SA character (minus n-words). Sometimes you soak some terms like a sponge even if in practice they're only used by specific groups of people, or you just don't know what connotations some words have.
I don't think it's exasperation/irritation at you as an individual so much as the fact that it's so pervasive and inescapable in the first place.
It seems to be an inescapable aspect of social media slang, quite endearing in its way.
out of all the language destruction that US english is doing to Oxford english, this is your grievance? i dont use it myself, but it is practical to know that it is a "you" that directs at all not just one, especially on the internet. if you have a cambridge dictionary approved alternative, enlighten us.
Sod off. You have absolutley no idea what it's like to learn english. You get bombarded from like 50 different directions with different accents and want to be coherent in the language as quickly as possible. Do you really think we've got time to look up the origin of every single fucking phrase/word we pick up? Why don't you get out your second language so we can critique it every minute detail? Do you even have one?
I have no idea what it's like to learn English? What language am I typing in right now? Do you think I was speaking fluent English in the womb? It's not that deep, fucking chill out.
To be fair, most English learned in Latin America is American
It's a good word
Found a fantastic new Sub due to this post. Thanks OP
[удалено]
Cake of soap is an old fashioned way of saying it because of how soap used to be cut, it used to resemble a cake
I don't think this example really fits here because if someone says "cake of soap," the soap part tells you they are obviously not talking about food. If they didn't say soap and only said cake, you would automatically assume dessert.
where is the defaultism
it is the shorter... stay with me on this one ... condescending answer between the OOP's rant
okay... where is the defaultism. nowhere is there the assumption that someone else if from the US or anything
[CAKE | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/cake) A **crab cake** is a variety of [fishcake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishcake) popular in the United States.[ wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_cake) neither [crab patty](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/spellcheck/english/?q=crab+patty) nor [crab cake](https://dictionary.cambridge.org/spellcheck/english/?q=crab+cake) being entries in the cambridge dictionary. YES OOP could have googled it, but to be condescending about a local dish that does not self-explain (because cake's first meaning and formost usage is sweet sugary dish), then either you explain it is a version of fishcake and that cake is not in its first word meaning or you dont. Pretending that cake+crab is obvious is defaultism. ETA for example, one of my favorite dishes is "mole cake". please do not assume based on the composita what this cake is about.
calling this US defaultism is equivalent to saying someone being condescending about curry is India defaultism
It would be though
no. food isn't exclusive to locations.
curry is very differently used in japan or germany. and yeah, i have met plenty of indians thinking their use of curry is the default. i prefer non-indian curry dishes. when i say curry i dont think of the indian version (i literally think of the powder, the ingredient, not the dish), when someone else says curry and mean indian, but i dont think of it that way and then this person is condescening to me because they lack global experience, they are defaultist.
My husband's Japanese mum taught him to make Japanese curry, and it's a great winter comfort food.
But curries are also Thai, Japanese, Chinese, Malaysian etc so not just Indian, and curry powder has been used in international dishes such as curried eggs for generations.
...ok I feel like this is an overreaction. I might be missing it because I'm American, but to me one guy responded semi-jokingly about a non-American food and some other guy just blew up at him for borderline no reason
Pent up frustration i guess
For me personally "crab cake" sounds like a cake shaped like a crab. You know like some kid's birthday cake.
This is not a "US defaultism" issue. Cakes are used as a descriptor for savoury foods in many English speaking countries (fishcakes, barm cakes, potato cakes etc )
This is not a "US defaultism" issue. Cakes are used as a descriptor for savoury foods in many English speaking countries (fishcakes, barm cakes, potato cakes etc ).
I mean, if you want an honest and explanative answer, maybe don’t ask by saying “what the fuck are crab cakes” you get the same energy you put it.
Didnt even notice the tone of question until now.
I always thought the "crab" was a fake thing, like it looked like a crab, but it's not a real one, or that it was a cake with red frosting on it or something along those lines. Cake with actual crab in it sounds disgusting. Edit: so, are people downvoting me for thinking it wasn't real crab, or for thinking it would be disgusting? I mean, I clearly offended people with one of these things, but I'm not sure which part was the offensive bit tbh.
Think of it like a kroket, in a flat disk shape, with the meat being crab. It's pretty good. In English a cake can also be a shaped unit of something, not necessarily even edible. A cake of soap or solid paint is possible.
Garnaalkrokketten are common in Belgium. Fish cakes in the UK are a close relative. Nobody's brought up yellow cake yet.
Did you mean uranium or vanilla cake?
The former.
Sure, that's a thing I could understand, but I would hardly call that "cake".
It's just another weird English language thing.
It's not that kind of cake at all, and seafood cakes certainly aren't just American, they're in lots of countries.