Handcrafted

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Today's Tank McNamara:



This certainly seems to be true for lemonade — "handcrafted lemonade" doesn't occur in the Google Ngrams index.

In the case of beer, homemade still beats handcrafted by a ratio of about 15 to 1, but at least handcrafted is on the scoreboard.



18 Comments

  1. Orin Hargraves said,

    May 8, 2016 @ 11:38 am

    A little more about "crafting" here:
    http://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/ll/writers-craft/

  2. Mara K said,

    May 8, 2016 @ 11:38 am

    How about "artisanal"? Does one have to be an artisan to make things artisanal?

  3. Eurobubba said,

    May 8, 2016 @ 11:51 am

    Recently saw the phrase "artisanal mining", which I thought was pretty odd.

  4. richardelguru said,

    May 8, 2016 @ 12:01 pm

    Eurobubba: "artisanal mining"

    Presumably how they got those wells in northern France? :-)

  5. Catanea said,

    May 8, 2016 @ 1:24 pm

    If you watch the BBC's Medieval Monastery Farm series, they do some pretty artisal lead mining in it.

  6. Brett said,

    May 8, 2016 @ 1:59 pm

    I once went to a farmer's market where somebody was selling "artisanal heirloom tomatoes," which seemed self-contradictory to me.

  7. Ralph J Hickok said,

    May 8, 2016 @ 2:18 pm

    I've seen a sign advertising "handcrafted smoothies."

  8. Duncan said,

    May 8, 2016 @ 5:46 pm

    I don't do alcohol (I've seen too many lives wrecked…) so the fine points of beer commentary sail right over my head.

    But I really like the punchline, and fully intend to make use of "handcrapted" in other contexts, now that I've discovered it! =:^)

  9. Gregory Kusnick said,

    May 8, 2016 @ 6:47 pm

    Homemade is about where it's made; handcrafted is about how it's made. One can have handcrafted beer in a brew pub, and machine-made bread at home.

  10. Bjorn said,

    May 9, 2016 @ 12:35 am

    "Home-brewed" and its variants seem to be even more popular than homemade, for beer:

    https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=homemade+beer%2Chome+made+beer%2Chandcrafted+beer%2Chomebrewed+beer%2Chome-brewed+beer&year_start=1960&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Chomemade%20beer%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chome%20made%20beer%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chandcrafted%20beer%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chomebrewed%20beer%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chome%20-%20brewed%20beer%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Chomemade%20beer%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chome%20made%20beer%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chandcrafted%20beer%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chomebrewed%20beer%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Chome%20-%20brewed%20beer%3B%2Cc1

  11. Robert Coren said,

    May 9, 2016 @ 10:23 am

    I tend to be mock-puzzled when a restaurant advertises something as "home-made"; since I assume that the chef doesn't actually live in the restaurant, I wonder why they didn't make whatever it is there instead of bringing it from home.

  12. Coby Lubliner said,

    May 9, 2016 @ 11:09 am

    Some restaurants use the more appropriate "house-made" (analogous to German hausgemacht) rather than "home-made". A house, after all, is not necessarily a home.

  13. David L said,

    May 9, 2016 @ 11:34 am

    Once — I swear this is true — I saw a local newspaper ad for a pizza take-out place claiming that their goods were "ho-made."

    This was in the days before phones that could take pictures, otherwise I would've.

    [(myl) A local restaurant advertises on its digital-lights sign "HOMADE TOMATO SOUP". I'll take a picture next time I walk buy, if they haven't changed the sign.]

  14. Brett said,

    May 9, 2016 @ 3:40 pm

    @David L: Did they serve pasta puttanesca?

  15. Viseguy said,

    May 9, 2016 @ 8:57 pm

    "Homade" could be defended as a simplified spelling. "Ho-made" sounds too good to be true — an eggporn?

  16. Robert Coren said,

    May 10, 2016 @ 10:01 am

    A restaurant I once ate at in a smallish town somewhere along the Dordogne had a menu that included English translations, some of which were (unintentionally) hilarious, including the repeated use of "house-maid" for fait(e) à la maison.

  17. JS said,

    May 11, 2016 @ 2:01 pm

    "Homade" could even represent a phonological change (reduction of geminate across morpheme boundary). I feel like I'm familiar with this distinction but haven't reflected on it.

  18. Adam F said,

    May 12, 2016 @ 1:37 pm

    The second batch of beer a friend and I made as students certainly smelled handcrapted. (The rest have been better.)

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