On Carl's Jr. and other thoughts

By Todd Stadler · Sunday, September 9, 2007 5:21pm

We went to Carl's Jr. for lunch today, and even though the food was okay, it bugged me for many reasons.

Of course, there are many problems with the name alone. Shouldn't it be "Carl's, Jr."? At least it should be if Carl's had a son.

And I hate how the period in "Jr." appears to prematurely terminate any sentence with the place's name in it, simultaneously appearing to create an incorrectly capitalized (and possibly fragmentary) second sentence. Every time I write something like, "This summer, I ate at Carl's Jr. and it was really, really good," people write back complaining about my poor grammar. And my uninteresting subject matter. (Fine! I didn't want to be your paper's stupid restaurant reviewer anyhow!)

Frankly, these typographical issues alone are why I don't write more blog entries on Carl's Jr.

(See how I threw its name at the end of the sentence to avoid all those problems? But I can't do that for every sentence involving Carl's Jr.! See, like that? You can't end a sentence with ".!"! Man, this is out of control.)

And what does "Carl's Jr." even mean? Is it a restaurant opened up by Carl's son? Wouldn't that be "Carl Jr.'s"? Or would it be "Jr's."? Maybe that's why the apostrophe migrated over to Carl.

In twenty years, will we all be eating at Carl's III? And aren't such post-nominal letters better suited to the monarchical Burger King, anyhow?

Or does the name refer to the fact that Carl treated the restaurant like his true son, sadly never acknowledging the several biological children he fathered, referring to them, however infrequently, as his "nieces and nephews"? (Just kidding, dear Carl Karcher Enterprises lawyers!)

Anyhow, I decided to get a particular burger for my meal. I'm not going to say its name, because it's goofy. I have issues with Carl Karcher Enterprise's nomenclature, alright?

But I could tell from the picture menu that the burger came with some sort of nasty condiment on the bun. I ordered mine with "no mayo".

The guy behind the counter said, "There's no mayo. That comes with [mumble mumble] sauce." I stared at the guy for two seconds while my brain did some processing and came to the conclusion that he must have said "Santa Fe sauce".

It's just that the guy was Hispanic, and he (logically) pronounced it with a Spanish accent as "sahn-tah fey", rather than the more common (for me, at least) "sant-uh" (rhymes with "ant-uh").

None of which would have prompted me to write this navel-gazing blog entry, except that I happen to speak a bit of Spanish. And hearing a man who probably also spoke Spanish refer to this condiment as "Santa Fe sauce" struck me as odd.

Because that would mean "holy faith sauce".

Oh, I know that it's named after the city in New Mexico, presumably based on the idea that everyone down there slathers foul, spicy soybean-based mayo on pretty much everything — a concept I have not personally found evidence for in my travels there. (But then, maybe I was confused because everyone in Santa Fe was just calling it "sauce"?)

Anyhow, as is so often true, it's ultimately the fault of the Spaniards. They're the ones who gave odd, and often annoyingly long, names to their cities. Wikipedia tells me that Santa Fe's real (that is, completely ignored) name is La Villa Real de la Santa Fé de San Francisco de Asís, or The Royal City of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi.

Rule number one for naming your city: don't include the name of other cities in the name. "What, you're from Assisi?" "No, I'm from The Royal City of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi!" "Can you diagram that for me? There's, like, twenty prepositional phrases there!"

I'm almost certain that long names like that ultimately led to Spain's loss of influence in that part of the world. See, when the non-Spaniards ride up to attack your town, you stand on the ramparts in your gleaming armored helmet and, after a trumpet fanfare, declare, "Attention would-be invaders! I speak for all inhabitants of The Royal City of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of ... Aah!" That last bit being where the invaders got tired of your pompously long geographic name and decided to invade before you'd finished reciting all of it.

And the first resolution of the new conquerors? "From now on, we just call it 'Holy Faith', okay?"

All of which is a fine name for a city in your theoretically religiously homogeneous country.

But it's an awfully odd name for a condiment.