A Muffin By Any Other Name...

...would be just as fattening. ;)
I've always been interested in cooking and baking. I remember I baked my first cake at about age 8, took it to a school party, and was very upset when nobody believed I had baked it myself. As a child I fed on my mother's Gourmet magazines, and I still read cookbooks as if they were novels. Finding and sharing recipes on the Internet and indulging in what some call "Food Porn" (trolling beautiful photos of foods) are some of my favorite down-time activities. This often inspires me to try out a new recipe, or it gives me ideas how to creatively use what's moldering away in the fridge.
This hobby has its perks; I am regularly entertained by the names of dishes. I've often wondered over the years how recipes come to be called what they are commonly known by. Germany and Austria are generally not very creative in their choices of "official" recipe names; the name more or less simply describes the contents of the dish, or is named "in the style of --- (town or region)". But what country people and local farmers call their traditional dishes can be very creative indeed: Schäufele (little shovels), Späetzle (little sparrows), Maultaschen (mouth pockets)...
The most intriguing name I have come across for a purely Austrian dish is the local nickname for a sausage officially called a Käsekrainer. A Krainer is a coarse, farmer-style pork sausage and a Käsekrainer is the same recipe with bits of white cheese added. (They're both delicious, by the way.) When grilled, the bits of cheese quite naturally melt, causing the sausage to leak or squirt somewhat alarmingly. You can imagine what it looks like when sliced. So it's not surprising someone came up with the name "der Eitrige" for this, which is what you'll most often hear requested at late-night sausage stands. What does that mean? "The one full of pus".
Sorry (but not very)!
England especially has some rather queer names for what turn out to be quite innocuous dishes: Toad in Hole (sausages baked in batter), Bubble and Squeak (leftover pan-fried cabbage and potato), the unfortunate Spotted Dick (sponge pudding with raisins)... But what really surprised me when I first got to Europe was the fact that no French person I ever met had heard of French toast, no German is familiar with what Americans know as German chocolate cake, and Salisbury steak is unknown in Salisbury. It turns out all these dishes are purely American; their misnomers mislead us to believe they originated in the places after which they are named.
When I did make German chocolate cake (plain chocolate layers with a filling and topping of pecans, shredded coconut and condensed milk) for my German friends, they loved it! But it's still not German in any sense of the word.
Looking toward moving to the UK, I realize I have a lot to learn. What I grew up believing was an English muffin is, in fact, much closer to a crumpet. An American muffin, on the other hand, would be known in the UK as a fairy cake if sweet, a bread if savory. (American sweet muffins have changed from when I was a child; now what is usually sold as a muffin is far closer to cake than the slightly sweet bread it used to be. And they are now 3 times the size!)
In the UK pancakes, flapjacks, and griddle cakes are all vastly differing foods. A sandwich can be known variously as a bap, a butty, a roll or a cob, depending on what bread is used and which part of the country you're in. In the USA and in Austria, if asked would you like some tea and you reply yes, the second question will be: black or herbal? But in the UK tea is always black tea unless stated otherwise; an herbal tea is a tisane.
Both A and I love soups, especially in colder weather. Many dishes I would probably call stew he calls soup. What we each call dumplings are two different dishes. No matter; we enjoy eating it whatever we call it, as long as it tastes good! A name can influence one's desire to taste the dish (or not), true; but it's the flavor that is convincing, not the name. For an example in English, who would ever think that "sweetbreads" meant "innards"?! But in Austria I have eaten and enjoyed some innards I would never have touched while still in the USA-- and all of them have euphemistic names.
That could, in turn, lead me to musing on many other things we-- perhaps wrongly-- assume, because of our misleading cultural appellation for a certain thing. Maybe we unthinkingly accept its origins as authentic and definitive, when perhaps they're not. Maybe we know the same flavor under an entirely different moniker. Maybe we have refused even to taste it because the name has put us off... et cetera.
Some examples:
what is "family"?
what is "evangelism"?
what is, for that matter, "a Christian"??
...but it's a Saturday morning, laundry needs to be done, and I've spent enough time on this already.
Have fun thinking about it yourself!