There is absolutely nothing wrong with giving other bars a heads up that there are underage people out trying to buy alcohol.
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Like ordering a cocktail at a bar, at 17?
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Isn’t it illegal to sell alcohol to obviously drunk people?
(different threshold from drink-driving limits, I guess…)
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Okay, so I’m a radical prescriptivist reactionary—but if you want to argue that “restaurant” is the source, I want you to use “restauranter,” not “restauranteur." Either we pretend English is a Romance language, or we don’t. Agreed?
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That sounds more like police corruption than laziness, to me.
I’m guessing your boss and the one other ponied up the appropriate “donations” to the police “charity” of choice, while all the rest either actively refused, or simply didn’t get the message when it was hinted to them in a deniably round about way.
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I want to believe your story, and it sounds completely over the top what the local PD did, especially in a wealthy tourist town in the summer that they shut down the restaurants. Is it bad for me to ask for a source? Wouldn’t this have been a big deal and appeared in local papers perhaps? (Without disclosing anything that would give your identity.)
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It’s a restaurant that also serves liquor, which is quite common.
But the point is that without knowing this, or learning of some other reason for the number (as in @mysterr’s examples), or seeing someone clearly non-nazi in a position of control/power (e.g., if @RatMan’s wide receiver opened a restaurant), it is very reasonable to be suspicious. And that is the fault of the nazis trying to “hide” their affiliation in plain sight.
ETA: I should add that this suspicion is reasonable here in the west. If i was in Korea and saw something with a name including 88 i would certainly assume that it was not nazi related.
Nope. The correct English term IS “restauranteur”, sorry, no matter how much that irritates you =) . “Borrow words” are like that.
Hint: The word “restaurant” is French in origin.
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Not. A. Bar. It’s a restaurant that also serves liquor.
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Except that “restaurant” only became a word in any language in 16th century France. So it’s a late import and doesn’t follow the “Latin” rules. We use restaurateur (or the variant with the “n”) because we’re following French, not Latin. Same as masseur/masseuse. Same reason we say “poleese” for “police” and not “poll ice”.
Speaking of which… I don’t like this idea that it’s okay for underage people to go into a bar by police order, but not okay otherwise. At 21 the drinking age is ridiculously high (isn’t the draft age 18 or something?). This doesn’t pass the smell test on several levels.
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It’s “restaurateur”. No “n”.
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Once again, NOT A BAR, it’s a restaurant that serves liquor. FFS, people…
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Nah, it’s English- we do whatever the frick we want. 
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Thanks, I do that all the time with that word =p …
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I’m just confused now if the argument is about the “n” or the “u”
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It is. But if that person was not obviously drunk when they left my establishment. Or was not actually drunk when they left my establishment, and drank elsewhere after leaving. Or if they were not drinking in my establishment at all, and simply mentioned us. Or I didn’t catch that they were drunk and served them one before cutting them off. Or I cut them off and they get in their car over my protests. Or tell me that some one not drunk is driving but lie. And so forth. The cutting them off and establishing that some one else is driving create some liability protection for the business. They do nothing to protect me from arrest.
The can’t serve (and it is serve, I don’t believe you can refuse to sell retail, sealed beer to take home to an intoxicated person) is entirely down to personal judgement and opportunity. I have to be able to tell you are visibly drunk, within a 30 second interaction.
So for example if that person is sitting at a table being served by a server and I never inter act with them. Thus never having the opportunity assess a persons mental state. I can still be arrested. Likewise typically you’re not being arrested for serving some one who is drunk, that’s a fine and often against the business. You are specifically being arrested under a drunk driving statute. Its now illegal to allow some one who is drunk to get behind the wheel, or over serve some one who will drive. All of these things I’m practically limited from controlling or establishing. To a certain extent I am now legally your babysitter.
I’m not averse to these things in concept. Its the overly broad and punitive way they’re being enacted these days. Traditionally drinking age violations and overserving were enforced against the establishment. Now they’re increasingly enforced against the staff. Who may not be able to clearly establish when some one’s drunk (if only because some people hold their liquor well) or if some one is underage (very good fakes). And may not have the option to do these things right. I’ve worked multiple places where my employment was threatened by refusing to over serve customers. Particularly friends of owners/managers. The business may be willing to eat the fines and costs to defend themselves in court. But staff can’t.
Yeah no. That’s not really a thing here. We’re talking about a very small town PD, and there’s no history of defacto bribes in the food/bev business here. It was part of a county wide “sting”. Though the arrest everyone and sort it out later approach wasn’t used anywhere else. So it’s police incompetence rather than corruption. We just happened to be one of the two restaurants at the edge of the village. They forgot the other place was there, and we had already closed by the time they worked their way to that part of town.
If there was a monetary motivation its that they fined every restaurant and every bartender. Most of which didn’t hold up when the courts got involved (most cases noone could establish any underage drinking was taking place). If bribery had been a factor. You’d see the opposite. Most places would have paid. And the few hold outs would have been hit. As it was every place they were aware of was on the list.
It was a surprisingly minor thing in the local paper. Just reported as a typical underage drinking sting, always good! But its a small village (the downtown of a larger town). Perhaps 10 restaurants with liquor licenses at the time. IIRC there were only 5 working bartenders who were not arrested that night. 3 at our place and 2 at t’other one. I’m not gonna drop a source. Mostly because the local/regional papers online archives are crap or paywalled so it’d be no use. Google didn’t turn up anything at all. But look into similar crack down weekends/nights around NY State and Long Island and you’ll likely see reports of similar sweeps. Though details will be light. Positive coverage of a successful county wide effort. Including x number of places cited for whatever violations and look how good we are a dozen people arrested!
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Same here.
Somewhere in my mind, I’m convinced I’m still a teenager, it’s 1996, and all is right with the world.
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You have to grow older, but you don’t have to grow up.
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If one of my children had been born on September 11th, I’d like to think I’d have enough wisdom to not name my Facebook page “Yay for 9/11!”.
There probably are honest mistakes by people who don’t realize what “88” symbolizes in the Western world, but generally speaking people try to commemorate the good while simultaneously avoiding any reference to the bad. Not too many kids named Adoph these days, for example.
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