Microwave it, use it as a verb
Nuke it.
why do we do this? Is it an american thing?
I think it’s because microwaves use, well, microwave radiation
radiation exists in like everything to some small degree tho right?
Radiation, in this context, is light. Everything from old school AM radio, to microwaves, to infrared, to visible light, to UV, and finally gamma rays are all just photons. For light, there are two energy metrics: how much energy the individual photons have, and how many photons are being emitted per unit of time. Only the energy level of the individual photons determine if the radiation is ionizing, as in, powerful enough to rip electrons off what it hits, including important molecules like DNA. Ionizing radiation starts at the UV range, so anything below that is not ionizing. This is why you can get skin cancer from UV but no amount of visible light can cause cancer. And microwaves are well below even visible light so they aren’t ionizing either.
Also, Wi-Fi and cellular networks operate in the microwave range. In fact, your microwave oven is 2.4 GHz, which is what older Wi-Fi equipment exclusively used, which is why your Wi-Fi connection used to crap out when you microwaved something. The reason you don’t feel your hand heating up from the microwave rariation coming out of your phone is because the number of microwave photons per second being emitted by your phone is far less than a microwave oven. Your phone’s antennas are 1 or 2 watts while your microwave is over 1000 watts.
Let’s excite these water molecules until they vibrate so hard it generates heat that transfers to surrounding atoms
heat itself being the average kinetic energy of said vibrating molecules makes the heat part of that sentence redundant. Now make me a sandwich
Abra cadabra, you are now a sandwich.
I’ll show myself out.
We speak Mandarin at home and microwave in Mandarin is 微波 “way bo” (literally means “micro wave”). To “microwave” as a verb usually gets shortened to the first character in colloquial speak. We 微 “way” our leftovers.
微波 means microwave as in that particular frequency range on the electromagnetic spectrum. When referring to the kitchen appliance as a noun, we specifically say 微波炉 “way bo lu” which means “microwave stove.”
Additional fun fact: If you think it sounds like Weibo the website, you’re right. It has almost the same pronounciation but has a tonal difference on the second character. Weibo means “micro blog,” same first character but the second character is 博 which is a loan word for blog.
We “ding” the food
I use Nuke.
Generally “nuke it” but occasionally zap make an appearance, microwave as a verb, and sometimes me-crow-wa-vay if I’m feeling extra
When I worked at McDonald’s in 2015, we called it Q-ing. That’s what the official term was. We got in trouble for calling it anything else.
Are you sure it wasn’t “queuing?” As in, “I’m queuing up some food to be cooked for our queue of orders.”
Nope, it was written “Q-ing” on the “Q-ing Oven” itself, as well as in the training materials and manuals!
Edit: here’s the manual for it!
