"Eggplant" is such an unwieldy word, it has altogether too many stops and starts, the ratio of consonants to vowels is out-of-whack. It is the auditory equivalent of porridge hitting the floor.
I'd prefer to use "aubergine", but then nobody knows what I'm talking about. When I lived in Italy, I knew it as melanzana, Greeks call it melitza, elsewhere it's melongene. In India it's brinjal and in Lebanon batinjan.
Since most of my recipes seem to have a middle-eastern quality, I'm really tempted by batinjan. Y'know ... come to think of it melanzana and melitza have Zs in them. There's a certain etymological aesthetic thrill at imagining putting some zkhuk on my melitza. It reminds me of the duke in The 13 Clocks who was prepared to slit minstrels from their guggle to their zatch.
So, dinner tonight will be ... wait ... am I going to have to explain what a melanzana is over and over? Will Google's spiders pass me by unless I list the most common name each time? Will I have to sacrifice aesthetics on the altar of search engine optimization? What a dilemma.
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