A famous Chicagoan, Irv Kupcinet, has died. He was a real icon in Chicago. The editorial memorializing him, a gossip columnist (at least in his early days), was talking about gossip columnists appearing to live delightful lives, "full of chance encounters with greatness and pickings that might seem quite easy to those of us who will never sit across the table from anyone publicly important. Never buy your own drink. Eat like a pasha. Gab until dawn and sleep until noon." etc.

Now, I hadn't heard the term "eat like a pasha" before. A "pasha" seems to be a Turkish title of honor. Do they eat well? I found 2 references to "eat like a pasha" on Google, but no description. Is it used in the U.K.? I did find some restaurants with that name in the U.K., particularly one in Kensington with a great Web site.

Of course, "pasha" is also a very large siluroid fish (Leptops olivaris) of the Mississippi valley, though I doubt that is the reference!

It's new to me. I expect that it's because being extremely wealthy pashas can afford to eat as much and as often as they please, but I have never heard it used before.

Eat like a horse, eat like a trencherman - yeas. Eat like a pasha ? No, never heard it.

Glaubt es mir - das Geheimnis, um die größte Fruchtbarkeit und den größten Genuß vom Dasein einzuernten, heisst: gefährlich leben.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Read all about my travels around the world here.
Read even more of my travel writing and poems on my weblog.

I've never heard the phrase either, but did find this a note in one of the dictionaries.

quote:

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Note: There are three classes of pashas, whose rank is distinguished by the number of the horsetails borne on their standards, being one, two, or three, a pasha of three tails being the highest.

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