On Pastries and Electronic Correspondence

A few months ago I was discussing some of the more amusing quirks of Israelis with the voluptuous Yael(two syllables I swear). She mentioned how when Israelis tell you their email address they will say the name then "Streudel" followed by the domain name. This is because the "at sign" @ looks kind of like a streudel pastrie. I'll give you an example: My (fake)email address is

"Baalteshuvabenny Streudel punksofzion.com" or Baalteshuvabenny@punksofzion.com

Obviously, I laughed at this prospect. But today I was at work when I was asking a customer her email address. As he started to recite the sequence of letters and numbers she had chosen, all I could think was "oh no, she's gonna get to the middle and say streudel and I'm going to bust out laughing." Now I work at a job (portrait photographer) where laughing is commonplace and infact encouraged, but laughing at a customer when she is giving her email address could be construed as a bit odd--to say the least. So, the woman--who was very cute, persian I think(from Great Neck)--I snickered when she got to the "Streudele" part. Luckily she didn't notice.

But, as the aforementioned Yael pointed out "Streudel" is alot more harder to say then "at." Why don't they just say it.


Wierdos!!!