Nice Weather, Eyeballs and Mirrors

Sounds like a pretty simple dish, doesn't it? What would you call it? Heated egg? Fried egg, perhaps? Not quite. For some reason, this dish has inspired weird names throughout the world.

In English, it's of course referred to as sunny-side up. This may strike English-speakers as completely normal, but comes across as exceedingly nonsensical to speakers of, say, Japanese, in which "sunny" is translated as "fair weather."

Hello, room service? I'd like coffee, some toast, and the side with the fair weather facing upwards, please.

But the Japanese themselves have an even odder nomenclature for this particular dish. They call it medama-yaki, which means "fried eyeball." It does make some sort of perverted sense, as the end result does look somewhat like an eye, especially if you've been taking hallucinogenic drugs recently.

Speaking of hallucinogens, what were the Germans on when they named this dish Spiegelei, which means "mirror egg"? It would make sense if there were invariably two of the eggs side by side, but it's called Spiegelei even if there's only one egg. Perhaps because, if you look very, very closely, you can see your nose reflected on the shiny surface of the yolk.