You, our readers, indulge me in an occasional tirade.  Diachronically, you will experience this from me.  To some it may seem trivial, but this heinous villainy must be met with commensurate force.  Even If I wax and wane through Victorian Shakespearean English, I think the my point will be met as though with a bare bodkin.  

What in the world am I talking about, even if the English is decipherable?  I’m talking about “Pubs.”  Has anyone else seen them popping up everywhere?  It seems as though any place that serves food and beer deems it legitimate nomenclature to call itself a pub.  This phenomenon is more trendy than 80s stirrup pants and the Macarina combined.  

“What of it?” you might say.  Nothing, I suppose, if you are not interested in words carrying any actual meaning.  I guess if you order a steak and the server brings you tofu, you think nothing of it.  After all, words don’t signify specific meanings and everything is open to the widest possible interpretation.  I don’t believe this to be true, even if words can be dictated by the context in which they are used.  ”Pub” might be what we can call an agreed upon meaning when it comes to what the term denotes.  If were borrowing words, let’s at least borrow some of their meaning.

What do most of these American “pubs” look like?  Burger and fry joints are the order of the day.  Much could be said about the lack of fish and chips and other stereotypical British food, but let’s not bifurcate the article into more than one point.  

Now I will make one concession: pub is short for public place or public meeting place.  However, it is telling that more than 60% of the beer that British people drink is done in this public place.  Yet we are borrowing “pub” from the English and we seem to have left it at that.  It seems singularly odd that our pubs don’t have any Ales, apart from Guinness and Bass (which are good Ales).  In fact, there is little decent beer at most pubs.  I would truly love to see our selection of beers widened drastically at these so called pubs.  If we can’t do that, can we at least go back to calling them bar and grills?  The profit difference between calling it a bar and grill or a pub is, I’m sure, minimal.  But the bankruptcy of calling it a pub when it has a serious lack of beer selection is foolish to the max.  Intolerable!