Gyro

Remember how I bought a book from a guy on the street for $5, which looked to have been done with the intention of bypassing the need for a publisher? It was titled "Coryworld, a wacky and futuristic science fiction novella where children race and dance inside a simulator, except for two of them :)" I gave it to my mother. She finished it, and this was her review:

"I finally finished that weird book you got from a panhandler. It was a "futuristic novella" about some dude making a simulation for his sociology class, where he makes a bunch of kids grow up, partake in a weird ritual dance and race, and then just deletes everything.

There were some interesting ideas in it but nothing really unique and the ending seemed pointless"

I'm not phased. I'd buy another $5 book on the streets, although maybe not by Gap Yuet Bing Ding.

Hey, you know what a gyro is? It's a Greek pita wrap with meat carved from a vertical rotisserie, often served with vegetables, tzatziki and garlic sauce. It's heaven is what it is.

The Kitchener-Waterloo area has a lot of places that serve these. Often alongside falafel, shawarma, and sometimes donair.

Gyro, shawarma, and donair, to my understanding, are all similar in nature but come from different cultures. Despite them being fairly interchangeable, it's not uncommon in my area for gyro to mean beef, shawarma to mean chicken, and donair to mean beef with some twist on the gyro. Interesting to note, donair is a pretty Canada-specific spelling for the word doner kabob, which is the original term for pretty much the same product. It became established enough and consistently misspelled enough, to get a new standard spelling over here.

Then there's Falafel, which is a chick pea dumpling meat substitute. It's not uncommon for shawarma, gyro, donair, and falafel to be listed on the same menu without consideration to the restaurant's cultural background. Generally speaking, gyro is what you want, because it's carved straight from the split, and the chicken shawarma often uses pre-packaged meat.

But you can't order gyro, because it's correct pronunciation is "yee-ro" but it's common-use pronunciation is "jai-ro". So you have the option of sounding pretentious by using the obscure correct pronunciation, or ignorant by using the uninformed pronunciation.

There's no consensus on how to approach this. I've said "jai-ro" in the past in an attempt to seem humble, and I've been served, although I've had to cringe when my server pronounced it differently. I've tried the authentic pronunciation and have been served just as dispassionately. If nobody cares, I think I'm going to try and pronounce it correctly.

I recently found five pennies on the ground. I've really had good luck with pennies recently.