Crack and crab
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Selected readings
- "Crab raccoon" (9/1/24)
- "Crab raccoon, part 2" (9/2/24)
- "Commas matter, Oxford and otherwise" (4/17/22) — lengthy bibliography on commas
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Vance R. Koven said,
May 10, 2026 @ 10:08 am
Use commas, as in eats, shoots and leaves?
Chris Button said,
May 10, 2026 @ 10:23 am
To be fair, this wouldn't have been ambiguous had "crack" not developed a narcotic sense.
Philip Taylor said,
May 10, 2026 @ 12:08 pm
Although the putative book would appear not to exist, a somewhat similar title has been written by two members of the Liberman clan — co-incidence, or what ?!
The Crab Book: How to Catch and Cook Crabs
Victor Mair said,
May 10, 2026 @ 12:29 pm
Good catch, Philip!
Thomas Hutcheson said,
May 10, 2026 @ 12:56 pm
It's "Eats, shoots, and leaves."
HTI said,
May 10, 2026 @ 12:59 pm
To be fair, this wouldn’t have been ambiguous had none of the words in the English language developed any senses.
Chris Button said,
May 10, 2026 @ 3:07 pm
@ HTI
You miss the point.
"Crack" is a verb, and you don't verb verbs. If it were a noun, then it would take an "s" as "cracks" (unless it's a narcotic).
Ryan said,
May 10, 2026 @ 5:45 pm
How to catch crabs, clean crack and cook and eat them could have been next level.
Roscoe said,
May 10, 2026 @ 8:10 pm
P.D.Q. Bach’s three-step crab dinner recipe (as transcribed by Peter Schickele):
– Step out the door.
– Step in a cab.
– Step in a restaurant and order the crab.
John Baker said,
May 11, 2026 @ 12:09 am
The example seems unduly contrived. One does not cook, crack, and clean crab, in that order.
J.W. Brewer said,
May 11, 2026 @ 12:14 pm
@John Baker: although I agree that that doesn't seem like the natural sequence of actions, searching the google books corpus finds a 1977 seafood cookbook containing the sequence "lf you have purchased live crabs, cook, crack, and clean them at least 2Vi [must be an OCR error?] hours before serving time." But I found that because it was on the first page of results for the simple sequence "cook crack," and the more important takeaway may be that over half of those first-page results used "cook crack" in the idiomatic cocaine-industry sense where "crack" is the direct object of "cook."
Michael J said,
May 16, 2026 @ 1:39 pm
Not the carcinologist, but I typically only cook clean crack.