Mind your language
Mind your language
Dot Wordsworth on language
I was having lunch with friends last week in a fairly swanky gastropub, and the menu promised a ballontine of quail. The waiter told me that ballontine meant that the quail had been deboned, then stuffed.
It was quite nice to eat, but I have only just discovered what the menu intended to say, which is ballotine. I was put right by an amusing little book on French words in English with the not fantastically funny title of French Letters and the English Canon (Timewell Press, £9.99). It is by Mark Daniel.
Actually, Mr Daniel says that the correct spelling is ballottine. He has seen it on menus even as balantine. I can’t find the word in my Littré, though he has ballotin, from ballot, a bundle.
Also nestling among the b’s of his 270-page rummage through English French, is baguette. I was surprised to learn that the word has only been used of a stick of bread since the 1950s, but so seems to be the case. I applaud Mr Daniel’s description as ‘hogwash’ the claim that sticks of bread of this kind were made on the order of Napoleon, so that soldiers could carry them in their trouser-legs.
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Asher Tarmon
October 14th, 2007 6:41pmAttention: Dot Wordsworth Apropos your mention of naming the sign @, (Spectator issue 6/10/07) you might be amused by the fact that here in Israel everyone calls it "strudel" - the Viennese rolled apple pastry which it resembles when sliced. Though the Hebrew Language Academy has tried to introduce a newly invented word for it, popular resistance prevails and "strudel" it remains!