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  • From: Thomas Beckett <thomas@tbeckett.com>
  • To: nafex@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [NAFEX] [Fwd: The Word Spy for 05/29/2003 -- PGST]
  • Date: Fri, 30 May 2003 12:18:56 -0400

I subscribe to a daily email newsletter that details developments in our
language. NAFEX members might find today's entry interesting.

Thomas Beckett
Durham, North Carolina

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: The Word Spy for 05/29/2003 -- PGST
Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 04:41:26 -0400
From: Paul McFedries <wordspy@logophilia.com>
To: thomas@tbeckett.com

PGST (PEE.gee.ess.tee) abbrev.

Permanent global summertime; the ability to purchase at the wholesale
level certain fruits and vegetables from different parts of the world
at different times of the year, thus enabling retailers to offer this
produce either year round or for longer periods than their
traditional local growing seasons.

Example Citation
---------------------------------
All-year-round strawberries are a sign of our times. The
supermarkets' efforts to get supplies of certain foods whatever the
season, meaning ordinary vegetables sometimes come from very
extraordinary places, has its own name. PGST (permanent global
summertime) is where the sun always shines, wrote Hugh Fearnley
Whittingstall in G2. But nothing tastes like fruit eaten on the day
it was picked.
--"10 things we didn't know this time last week," BBC News, May 16,
2003

Earliest Citation
---------------------------------
There used to be a point, at the height of the UK strawberry season,
when greengrocers sold "jam" strawberries. These didn't look so
perfect as the more expensive "table" strawberries, but they were
often superior in the taste department, bursting with scarlet
ripeness. The few minutes spent paring off bashed bits was more than
compensated for by the taste, a strong, deep essence of strawberry
flavour that, when folded into sweetened, whipped cream, delivered
the most exquisite summer delight.

Today, jam strawberries are a sepia-tinged memory, as are local
greengrocers, for that matter. They fit into our food memory box
along with those holiday snaps of the foreign market where we stood
in front of pungent mountains of mature cantaloupe melons,
sun-ripened tomatoes and turgidly ripe apricots. These days, the
reality is that most of us buy our fruit and veg in supermarkets,
where all the irritating idiosyncrasies of fresh produce have been
ironed out to create Permanent Global Summer Time (PGST), a curiously
uniform, nature-defying new order. The UK strawberry season now
miraculously extends from April right through to November.
--Joanna Blythman, "Strange fruit," The Guardian, September 7,
2002

See Also
---------------------------------
Coca-Colanization:
http://www.wordspy.com/words/Coca-Colanization.asp

farmageddon:
http://www.wordspy.com/words/farmageddon.asp

Frankenfood:
http://www.wordspy.com/words/Frankenfood.asp

glocalization:
http://www.wordspy.com/words/glocalization.asp

Words About Words
---------------------------------
Summer afternoon -- summer afternoon; to me those have always been
the two most beautiful words in the English language.
--Henry James, American novelist and critic, quoted in Edith Wharton,
_A Backward Glance_, 1934

Miscellanea
---------------------------------
The WordSpy mailing list is available in an HTML version that bears
an uncanny resemblance to the pages on the Word Spy Web site (see the
address below). If you'd like to try it out, send a note to
listmanager@logophilia.com and include only the command "html
wordspy" (without the quotation marks) in the Subject line.

For more Word Spy words, see the Word Spy Archives:
http://www.wordspy.com/

You are currently subscribed as thomas@tbeckett.com.
To drop this address from the list, you have two choices:

Send a message to listmanager@logophilia.com and include only the command
"leave wordspy" (without the quotation marks) in the Subject line.

Or,

Use the following Web address:

http://www.wordspy.com/list/remove.asp?Email=thomas@tbeckett.com&ID=26189
========================================================






  • [NAFEX] [Fwd: The Word Spy for 05/29/2003 -- PGST], Thomas Beckett, 05/30/2003

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