Gooey ducks

My friend Ed in Hawaii sent me a menu from a Manhattan restaurant famous for its ultra-chic fish dinners. He said it “would also be a good source for stimulating your creativity.” Thanks, Ed. Here goes:

First off, there’s a prix fixe of $125. At the top of the menu under the heading “almost raw,” is oysters. How many? Six. That works out to a little less than twenty-one bucks apiece. I hope you can at least get to choke on a pearl or two for that price.

The third item on the menu brought back a memory from when I was a kid. Mom and Dad often talked about going to the coast to dig up geoducks, giant long-necked mollusks that bury themselves in the mud at the ever-shifting shoreline. The odd thing to me, beside the creatures themselves, was the pronunciation of the name—using the rules you learned in grammar school you’d think it was jee-oh-duck, but it’s gooey-duck instead. (Click here to hear.) Whoever first established the spelling of that name sure broke the rules by reversing the vowel sounds of the first two syllables. The word is from Lushootseed, the Salishan language of Puget Sound in Washington, and it means dig deep. Like four feet deep! But you get a beast that weighs up to eight pounds for your effort.

To get my money’s worth if I’m going to shell out a hundred and twenty-five clams, give me a ’duck!