I’ve managed to catch yet another cold. And what do I do when I get a cold? I call up the Vietnamese restaurant and order “healing soup,” known more commonly to the rest of the world as “chicken pho.”
So it was pho for dinner last night. And while I was out to pick up the pho, I stopped at the grocery store that’s in the same plaza to buy a few other things that we needed, like milk and cough drops. But being tired, I forgot to buy the cough drops. And in my eagerness to eat the soup while it was hot, I rushed into the house with my bags of food and inadvertently left the milk in the car, which led to some serious puzzlement this morning, because the milk was not in the fridge where it was supposed to be. Good thing the weather stayed cool last night!
P.S. We used to pronounce the word “pho” like “foe,” but then we learned that it’s supposed to be more like “fuh,” having come from the French word “feu.” But when my husband tried to order “fuh,” they said, “You mean ‘foe?'” So now I’m confused.
Maybe their phone was answered by some American who didn’t know better?
I mispronounced “gyro” for a long time. Foreign food words are tough!
I’m still not sure about “gyro.” I’ve heard “hero,” “yero,” and “jie-ro.” I think it’s supposed to be the second of those three. Is that what you’ve heard, too?
My understanding is that the “y” sound is as close as American English gets to the correct Greek pronunciation.