I see by the snailpapers that Matt Gross of the New York Times still insists on calling lamen as ramen and pronouncing it with an R sound when everyone knows it's really lamen with an L and that the Japanese, who do pronouce it with an L sound, made a mistake long ago when they spelled it in English, their second language, with a R. Wrong!

We told Matt,

konnichiwa and ni hao ma, shalom aleichem too: my post above re lamen/ramen .... wonder if you can find time later to comment pro or con? I realize this is an impossible Sysiphean, Quixotic task, getting the Western world to correct the way it spells and pronounces lamen, but it must be done. What if we all called London as Rondon? What if we called Taiwan as China when it is not China? What if people wote hootzpah instead of chutzpah and pronounced it as HOO PAH? Would you let them get away with that? No way. Not on your grnadmother's gefilte fish! Or is that garfilter fish? Come on, Matt, c'est le temps to correctly spell and pronounce lamen with the L firmly in place, and your little daughter will be one happy camper when she grows up and realizes she can call lamen by its real name. Capice? Can do? Fact is the Japanese spellers make a mistake when they turned the hiragana lamen into English ramen, and the mistake is nothing to be ashamed of. But it's a mistake nevertheless. It needs to be rectified. But how? By the way, I can no longer eat lamen due to my advancing age, diabetes and recent heart attack. Still, I remain optimistic I will see lamen spelled correctly in my lifetime. Already one restaurant in NYC does call itself a lamen shop. See? Change we can! Lamen we can!