I received a Jumbo restaurant voucher a few days ago (spend $150 and get $50 off. OH MY I’m definitely going for it!!) and printed on it was a description of their famous chilli crab.
“Award winning chilli crab
Bathed in a zesty and tangy chilli sauce
An iconic dish that is truly Singapore “
Bathed. Do you think “Bathed in sauce” sounds weird? "Bathe" connotes to me that whatever is in the sauce, crab being the case here, is going to be soggy, not flavourful and … just plain wet. Like someone drenched in the rain and has her limp hair all over her face.
So I did a cobuild and british national corpus of bathed but there weren’t any results of bathed and sauce together. They showed mostly “the sky was bathed in moonlight/sunshine” and “bathe wounds”.
However, the results from the corpora seem limited. Maybe they’re a smaller version because it’s free? Or maybe the corpora are only collected from a limited sources like travel/fashion magazines, books, blogs etc. so the lexis of food is left out. So, I googled “bathed in sauce” and there were 133,000 results! Apparently the use of “bathed in sauce” is used quite frequently in the lexis of food!
Anyway, I was thinking, as a Singaporean I wouldn’t describe the sauce in chilli crab as zesty and tangy. It feels like the blogger, Mr Brown’s “parody” of trying to order Ba Chor Mee in English. But I guess Jumbo Restaurant is trying to reach out to the angmohs.
Award winning chilli crab
Damn shiok!
See. Singlish drives the point home perfectly fine and no circumlocution needed!
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