... it's caught by the Matador, on his mat

[venta]

I'm confused about the word pitt. I think it's spelled with two t's.

The stone in an olive is called a pitt. A thing-for-getting-the-stones-out-of-olives is called an olive pitter.

Therefore a pitted olive is one which has had its stone removed.

I bought some olives which I was told weren't pitted. They have no stones.

Therefore a pitted olive is one which contains a pit - ie hasn't had its stone removed.

This could all be explained by me having just been misinformed about my olives. But I have heard people using the word pitted in both contexts.

Worse, the olives are upstairs in the fridge and no one will go and get them for me. It's a hard life.

Comments

[blackmetalbaz.livejournal.com]

Erm, a pitted olive is one which doesn't contain the stone. As far as I'm aware, anyone else is just wrong :-)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_corpse_/]

Worse, the olives are upstairs in the fridge and no one will go and get them for me. It's a hard life.

It's the pits!

Ba-boom- (and if you will) -chah!

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

It's a bugger. I've noticed a tendency in the last few years for dates to be sold as "stone-in" or "stone-out" dates rather than simply "stoned dates". This has robbed me of the opportunity to go "Oh wow, stoned dates man" every time I walk past them in the supermarket, which is probably a Good Thing.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Update: Having now got off my arse, and fetched the olives, I can clarify.

I bought some olives which I was told weren't pitted. Most of them have no stones.

Ah well. I don't think my colleague needed that tooth anyway.

[cuthbertcross.livejournal.com]

mmmmmm. Olives.
:o)
Does that mean if you eat the olive then spit the pitt into the bin, that with pitted olives, you have to spit the hole somewhere?

[bateleur.livejournal.com]

Nope, the holes are edible (although they aren't very good for you).

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

Very low in calories, though.

[voratus.livejournal.com]

Pitted is just an adjective describing the whatever
Like the moon is cratered (full of craters).
That person's face is pock-marked (full of craters).
Those olives are pitted (they gots da pits).

[venta.livejournal.com]

But is the pit that the olive's got a stone, or the crater where the stone was ?

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

No, these are transitive verbs. crater, mark and pitt are verbs as well as nouns:

I marked the spot -> I made a mark
I pitted the olive -> I removed the pitts

If "Those olives are pitted" means "they gots da pits" then similarly "This fish are filletted" would mean "they gots da bones", which is clearly not true. In means "they got da bones taken out"!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_corpse_/]

Or a boned quail would have bones as opposed to not, which once sufficiently confused a drunken me at a banquet that I ended up with metaphorical gravy on my chin.

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

Much better example!

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, a boned bodice works like that, so I'd have thought a quail was bound to.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_corpse_/]

Mebbe when talking about bodices, 'boned' refers to the whale which is now just a big blob of blubbering blubber?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Awww, poor whale :(

I feel quite relieved my corset is steel-boned, and thus all I have to contend with is an image of a big blubbering blob of ore.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_corpse_/]

Now I have a vision of a steel (or adamantium) boned whale, in a Wolverine snickerty-snick stylee. Wonder where the claws would come from?

[wimble.livejournal.com]

That's really not the vision I got, with that prompting :)

[pm215]

I'm confused about the word pitt. I think it's spelled with two t's.

I'm confused as well now, because I thought it only had one 't'.

[venta.livejournal.com]

A quick visit to dictionary.com suggests you are right.

I just got carried away with all the t's in pitted. Or something.