Duffins, cronuts and olive jars

A trip to a local shopping centre yielded two linguistic snippets. One shop was selling duffins, which it helpfully explained as “not a donut, not a muffin”. Cronuts (doughnuts made from croissant dough) have been a thing for a while now (Wikipedia says 2013). Duffins appear to be new. Wikipedia does not have a page for them and several news stories online from earlier this month talk about the product’s launch, but the company’s own website says that “The duffin is back”. Pages for Mac auto-changes duffin to muffin and red-underlines it when I change it back. 

Hang on, though. If a doughnut made from croissant dough is a cronut, then shouldn’t one made from muffin dough be a muffnut? Maybe not …

(spelling: Google Ngrams shows that doughnut is used more in BrEng, and about equally with donut in AmEng. I don’t often write about them, so I don’t know what my natural usage is. (PS My diary for my first stay in Korea 2006-9 has three instances of donut(s) and none of doughnuts, but that’s hardly convincing.)) 

(pronunciation: I had always pronounced croissant with kw-. Various dictionaries give kr-, krw- and kw-, so there’s obviously no unanimity (Wiktionary gives the most options). The other issue is -ant, which can be -ant, -ont, -ənt or ɒ̃. A lot depends on how French you try to be.)   

My wife bought a jar of olives. Around the top is a message/are messages in four languages. 

CAPSULA DI SICUREZZA / PREMENDO AL CENTRO, L’ASSENZA DI “CLIC CLAC” GARANTSICE L’INTEGRITA DELLA CHIUSRA
CAPSULE DE SECURITE • SE SOULEVE A L’OUVERTURE / LE “CLIC CLAC” A L’OUVERTURE EST VOTRE GARANTIE
SAFETY BUTTON / SAFETY BUTTON POPS WHEN SEAL IS BROKEN
VAKUUM • SICHERHEITSVERSCHLUSS / KNACKT BEIM ERSTEN ÖFFNEN

I won’t discuss these at length, but clearly, different languages say equivalent things in different ways, and use a different number of words to do so.

PS 25 Jul: at a work meeting today my manager digressed and spontaneously mentioned lamingscones (which I have now discovered is styled as Laming-Scones). Non-Australians may need to look up lamingtons and scones.  

PPS 1 Aug: today I watching a Youtube video by someone walking around Seoul. I saw a bakery advertising croiffles. 1 Sep: Another video shows croffles.

PPPS 2Aug: I mentioned this on Facebook and a friend said her local supermarket sells muffnuts.

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durk(y)

At work I did something to the text of a document as an experiment, looked at the result and exclaimed “That looks durky”. This is not a word which I would usually use, and almost certainly not a word at all. Maybe I was thinking “dorky”, which is a word I occasionally use. But there was no doubt as the general meaning, and absolutely no doubt as to the grammar. Durky just has to be an adjective, and probably a negative one. 

A colleague and I speculated about other sentences where durk(y) might have a positive meaning: I love the way you durk, You are the durk of my life. Durk could be a noun or verb. Although I used durky, durk could also be an adjective, but the pairing would probably be durk (noun) < > durky (adjective) or durk (adjective) < > durkness (noun), depending on which came first, with durkiness hovering there uncertainly. In turn, the adverb would be durkly or durkily. In the end, we don’t have to decide, because the word is unlikely to catch on. It’s just not fetch enough.

Durk(y) is more likely to have a negative meaning. There’s something about ur/ir or or which makes them sound dark: dirty or dorky. I’ll let you guess (if you don’t know) whether JRR Tolkein’s Mirkwood was a pleasant place or not.

Later in the day, I was listening to an extended piece of classical music and Youtube interrupted the movement with an ad for a product or service by Google. I said “Durk you, Google!” (Maybe I should have blamed Youtube.)

Trumputin, Trumpkim

Trumputin seems to be a thing, but I can’t find any occurrence of Trumpkim. There’s Trump-Kim and Trump, Kim etc but not Trumpkim. If it does become a thing, you saw it here first.

Personally, I wouldn’t trust any/all of them as far as I could comfortably throw them, but at least talking about talking is better than not talking about talking or talking about not talking or not talking about not talking. And nobody’s insulted anybody for several days now.

libfixes

Yesterday I posted about the suffix -(a)holic. This is an example of what the US linguist Arnold Zwicky has termed a libfix – that is, a portion of an existing word which is “liberated” and used as an affix (usually a suffix) to create a new word, retaining some of the meaning of the existing word. This is not a new phenomenon, but has certainly become more common in the last 50 years; -(a)holic as a libfix dates from 1965. Some of these words have established themselves, but many remain marginal. Because of this, there are no consolidated lists of them. One of the best I found was an article by the US linguist/blogger Neal Whitman in The Week. He lists and briefly explains:

-ana, -burger, -cation, -dar, -erati, -fu, -gate, -gasm, -inator, -jitsu, -kini, -licious, -mageddon, -nomics, -omics, -preneur, -que, -rama/-orama, -stock, -tacular, -tainment, -tastic, -tini, -tard, -verse, -wich and -zilla. (If you don’t recognise any of those, click through to the article.)

There are more – he doesn’t list -(a)holic and I can also think of –splaining (which can even be used as a word in its own right; there is a difference between explaining and splaining. You see, splaining is when someone … oh, right). Some of these are imaginative, and some will last; others are awkward and/or lazy – every slight political scandal is now a –gate.

PS two examples from real life. This morning at a supermarket I spotted perinaise (peri peri + mayonnaise). This afternoon while driving I was behind a car belonging to someone offering mobile spray tans (?why). The first word of the small print was ‘Glamourlicious’. Just in case ‘glamourous’ isn’t … glamourous enough. (My preference is for ‘our’ spellings, but ‘glamourous’ looks kind of wrong, but I can’t quite bring myself to use ‘glamorous’ (as opposed to mentioning it, which I just did).

Mhotel

There are hotels, and there are motels, and there are hotel/motels … and there is at least one mhotel. I’d rather there wasn’t. I saw it briefly as we were touring south of Sydney earlier today. I can’t remember the name of it, and wouldn’t tell you (no free publicity) if I could. Most of the results online are either M Hotel or mHotel.

In fact hostels came before hotels, and hospitales came before hostels. Some hospitales were hospitable, and some were hostile.

(Many years ago, an exchange student lived with a family we knew. At the end of his stay, he solemnly thanked them for their hostility.)

Jabberwocky

I have thought of an idea for a post based on Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem Jabberwocky. I copied the poem from an internet site and pasted it into Word for Mac. Immediately, I realised that some of Carroll’s nonce words were red-underlined for spelling, and others weren’t.

Red-underlined are: toves, gimble, wabe, mome, raths, outgrabe, Jabberwock, Jubjub, frumious, Bandersnatch, vorpal, manxome, Tumtum, uffish, tulgey, Callooh, Callay (17). Not red-underlined are Jabberwocky, brillig, slithy, (gyre), mimsy, borogoves, whiffling, burbled, snicker-snack, galumphing, beamish, frabjous, chortled (12 or 13). I’ve put gyre in brackets because it exists as a noun but not as a verb, as Carroll uses it in this poem.