24 Jan
2013
24 Jan
'13
5:51 p.m.
On Jan 24, 2013, at 6:23 PM, Ethan Dicks <ethan.dicks at gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 5:05 PM, Fred Cisin <cisin
at xenosoft.com> wrote:
I very intentionally did not quote Wikipedia precisely to avoid
subsequent source bashing.
I always thought it was "dies" too, but in trade rags, advertisements,
etc., going back decades, "dice" appears to be the preferred plural
within the industry, common street English be damned.
You would call the pieces of a diced tomato "tomato dice" (though
one seldom has a reason to refer to them as such, I've seen it
done in plenty of cooking publications). Basically, the pieces
of something that is "diced up" are called "dice", or "die"
for
plural. I've never seen anyone refer to a "tomato die", but it
would probably be syntactically correct.
I'm also unsure of the underlying etymology of it, but common
wisdom would have it that it's because large food dice are more
or less the size of playing dice. Seems a bit too convenient to
me; we have plenty of linguists on this list who may know better.
- Dave
> Dice?
Do you mean "dies" maybe?
On Thu, 24 Jan 2013, Ethan Dicks wrote:
In industry pubs I've read, I've seen
them called "dice".
Are they as authoritative as Wikipedia? :-)