User talk:Realmeleven

Vanilla is NOT Plain

Vanilla is one of the strongest and most expensive flavourings in existence. I know this because I purchase about 25 grams (just over an ounce) every year or so. Less than one half of one percent by mass of vanilla pod ground with coffee beans will completely overwhelm the espresso and the bitterness is far stronger than anything that coffee or cocoa can produce. However, if your coffee beans are more than a week old and you really hate stale coffee, a fraction of a gram of vanilla pod is just the thing to make the espresso a bit more palatable - especially if you don't have time to reroast the beans for half an hour in the oven prior to grinding.

Due to the fact that dishonest businessmen use the word, "vanilla" to denote a lack of flavour in their food, the term is often misused by victims of this fraud who have never tasted vanilla (even if they have had many foods falsely labelled as vanilla flavoured). Businesses that use the term vanilla to describe food that lacks "vanilla pod" as one of the flavourings or ingredients should be reported to the ACCC in Australia or the Better Business Bureau in the United States for deceptive business practices.

For those of us who know what vanilla tastes like, the implications of the term in conjunction with software implies bugginess to the point of crashing your operating system if you do not tiptoe around every single bug, and a five figure price tag (at least 100 times the price of alternative packages). This is because real vanilla pod costs more than 100 times the price per kilogram of coffee and cocoa (by weight), and if you make the slightest miscalculation in the amount used, it will overwhelm the food. I definitely wouldn't call unmodified Oblivion "vanilla" - not by any stretch of metaphirical logic. To start with, Oblivion is far to stable to qualify for the label and it doesn't cost enough either.

If we mean plain, can we please just "call it like it is" and say what we mean - instead of something that just gives dishonest businessmen yet another excuse for their dishonesty. The term we use in software development to describe a largely unmodified environment is "clean" and I think this would be a great deal more meaningful than "vanilla" - especially considering that fact that both TES4 construction set and GECK are fairly high level object oriented programming languages with more in common with Visual Studio than with an oven or a saucepan!

To begin with, the term "vanilla" is generally a reference to the ice cream flavor, which may or may not involve actual vanilla, and in any case is not particularly strong. Further, the idea that it is "plain", I think, has to do with two things:

1. Vanilla is white, a rather "plain" color
2. Vanilla is one of the two "default" flavors of ice cream, and chocolate is generally the more flavorful (in ice cream). Further, chocolate has various connotations of richness, boldness, and even sexiness, making it unsuitable for a term for "plain", and so that job falls to vanilla. Generally, the idea is "vanilla, as opposed to rocky road with fudge and sprinkles and and and!" - the idea being that it's just the single flavor, as opposed to the ice cream loaded with toppings and extras, so comparing it to cocoa or strawberry or whatever else is fallacious; you would need to compare it to more complex, compound flavors in order to get at the heart of the idiom.

Finally, I highly doubt that the Better Business Bureau would care about the use of the term "vanilla" in a product, unless they said "natural vanilla" or some-such indicating that they actually meant vanilla pods rather than some artificial flavoring, because "vanilla" typically refers to the flavor rather than the actual plant that has that flavor, at least in common usage. This may be technically incorrect, but unlikely fraudulent.

At any rate, I do feel your pain; being from New York, I have a certain amount of pride in our pizza, and am appalled by what, say, Californians think about pizza. There, they think it odd that I order "plain" cheese pizza - they consider the toppings the most important part of the pizza. That is, of course, preposterous; if the "plain" cheese pizza itself is not good, adding things on top of it is not going to make it so. The most important part of the pizza, in fact, is the crust, which few people realize, but it's very true. Californian pizza does extravagant things with the toppings, but they neglect the foundation too much. Probably because the water quality there is atrocious.

Dragoon Wraith TALK 23:45, 14 January 2009 (EST)