Back to the topic after a few hundred topic drifters:
Yesterday my wife an I walked out of a restaurant that was so noisy that we could not hear the server nor could the server hear us. After a few minutes of “What?” we left. It was a time usually busy for a restaurant . Our leaving decreased the head count by 25%, so I predict a shift to silence or bankruptcy. The noise came from the restaurant’s air handlers!
Are air handlers air purifiers?
If you left, you also took some of your CO2 with you! Improving the ventilation situation for the customers who stayed for dinner.
I hate the word “cougar” unless it refers to the big cat. It’s a word that refers to any and all women older than a male partner, this signalling how deviant it is from the “normal” relationship. There is no counterpart for men. “Sugar daddy”, for instance, refers to a specific transactional relationship— it’s not an all purpose term. I have other theories and thoughts about the language here, but that will take us all too far OT.
Most of the air noise came from exhaust fans over the open grills. The noise permeated the entire restaurant.
Huh, I don’t think ‘cougar’ in this sense is a deviant, negative or sexist term in the least. I consider it celebratory. And there IS an equivalent term for a male, stupid as it sounds: ‘manther’.
That use of the word ‘cougar’ has up in more than a few conversations I’ve had, and every person, male and female, involved in those conversations considers it a sexist and insulting label. Obviously Kaleo has a different opinion.
I’ve never heard the term ‘manther’ but it also to me is a sexist and insulting label.
It implies that the older woman is a predator. Which in turn implies that the younger man is prey, rather than being a willing participant in the relationship. If that doesn’t scream “deviant, negative or sexist” to you, well, I don’t know what will.
I hate the term cougar, too.
Keeps the staff and client base safer. Do you know how many kitchen staff died in the first wave of COVID in 2020?
I’m hard of hearing so I avoid loud restaurants like the plague. That said, I wish more restaurants used air purifiers.
This marks my first (and I suspect, only) time hearing of it. And yeah, that’s pretty stupid.
It’s one of those words where one is tempted to say “Oh come on. Someone just made that up.” which only invites the retort “Yeah. Same as EVERY WORD EVER.”
I always thought the phtase was “dirty old man” 
To me, it connotes a being that knows what she wants and assertively acts to get it, regardless of conventions.
I’ll also observe that ‘cougar’ is not a gender term, unless you’ve already bought into the moral-sexual presumption it’s pejorative.
‘Cougar’ is a loaded term and is at least somewhat ‘claimed’ by a certain portion of people to whom it applies. Much like ‘queer’ has gone from being absolutely pejorative to neutral or even positive connotations, depending on the speaker and the context.
To be sure, it’s quite easy to find instances of folks using the word in a misogynistic sense, implying there’s something ‘unseemly’ about a woman being older than her male companion. But at least part of that depends on finding the arrangement itself improper, regardless of what word is used. Again, one can draw a parallel with being ‘accused’ of being gay. In an era where that was socially unacceptable, that was a pejorative. Now, the response is (properly) “Yeah. So?”
Touche. The things people choose to get exercised about…
There’s a simple–yet hard–solution: stop going along with loaded terms.
“To you” is not the be all and end all. In case you were not aware.
Really. Care to offer any examples of the term being used to describe someone who is not female-presenting?
Perhaps it’s time to leave the cougar discussion and return to restaurant features? I get the thread drifted naturally as a result of discussing severs making assumptions , but maybe the time has come to drift back?
Rawr. (Yes, it’s time to move on)
Restaurants offering takeout using one of the delivery services when the service doubles the cost. Yep, my $15 sub becomes $30. It’s a local service but I expect the big national ones will be similar.
You do know they have to pay the delivery folks something, right?
I agree with @linguafood 100% on this. The delivery people have to be paid and I like to take it one step further and favour restaurants that hire their own drivers such as you have done. The delivery apps charge the restaurants a 30% commission so I order from restaurants that have their own drivers so my money goes to the restaurant. I also give the driver a 15% tip.
