Butty or Cob?

One of those “what do you call it?” quizzes that I so enjoy — Lincolnshire Live posted an image of a bun full of thick-cut French fries (as we Yanks call them) and asked for reader responses, and this is the result:

Chip butty and chip cob were by far the two most popular answers on our Facebook post (although there was a clear winner – see below) – but there was a lot of disagreement, and a lot of other names were thrown out there as well.

Teacake and barm cake were two others that got name-checked, while roll, batch, breadcake, bap, cake, muffin and even just bread all got votes.

One thing is for sure, though – everyone who voted thought they were right, and many mocked others for their answers! Indeed, some even suggested people should leave the county if they don’t use the ‘right’ word for it.

Which seems harsh to us.

It’s also got a useful map of names for bread rolls around the UK.

Comments

  1. David Eddyshaw says

    It’s a bap. All other answers are simply incorrect, and probably Signs of Our Times in some way.

    I see, incidentally, that the HIghlanders are too poor even to have a word for “bap.” I expect the Lairds have eaten them all, probably as a reprisal for 1745.

  2. Ah, tiny sample, which explains the surprising (to me) results: I think ‘Barm’ is far more widespread into South and West Yorkshire. And ‘Bap’ is more widespread throughout the Midlands. (Geographical note for those who’ve not been north of Watford Gap: Yorkshire is not Midlands.) ‘Breadcake’ is mentioned in the text, but doesn’t appear on the map: why? it’s used over an extensive area.

    What a map doesn’t show is the class gradations. ‘Roll’ is the RP/middle class word. So all those other words would be regarded as ‘Regional’/dialect at best, and working-class at worst. I suspect if they’d sampled different people in the same places (inner-city vs suburbs vs rural) they’d get a different geographical distribution.

  3. AJP Crown says

    My grandmother who had no connection to the West of England or Wales said bap. A bun (or at a pinch, teacake) has currants, raisins and possibly sugar in it. Whereas a roll doesn’t. Unless it’s a Swiss roll. And it’s a chip butty, a technical term coined in Liverpool. There’s also a sort of Franco-Liverpudlian toasted jam sandwich called a jam-butty-fritty.

  4. David Eddyshaw says

    And it’s a chip butty, a technical term coined in Liverpool.

    Good point. [When is a bap not a bap? When it’s a chip butty.]

  5. AJP Crown says

    Bap, bun & muffin aren’t class-related. That they’re to some extent regional is the premise of the post.

  6. Trond Engen says

    It’s a map of the word ‘bap’. A bap map.

    It’s also a map of where that word is unknown. A bap gap map.

    And the data was quickly assembled. It’s a —

    Though it’s based on poor data. It’s a —

    Somebody made it. It’s tempting to call him the —

    Tempting but a grave mistake,. It’s the —

    Those who do should be corrected. They deserve a —

  7. PlasticPaddy says

    @antC
    is there also a sweet version of barm with currants? Compare irish bairín breac or barmbrack.

  8. Really the names of various single-serve breads vary not just be region (and class) but by shape, size, and filling. The source for the map is usvsth3m.com which states…:

    we asked about what you call a bread roll, the kind of thing you might split in two and fill with ham and cheese (or chips, if you’re from the north). …but we cocked up the question and asked about a “small bread roll” rather than just showing a picture, so people interpreted it different ways and these results are probably not accurate.

    …an admirable level of scientific commentary for a project associated with the Daily Mirror.

    To a simple Corkonian like me, “blaa” was just the Waterford name for what I would call a bap. But Waterford got EU protected geographical indication for “blaa”, which has detailed specifications (apart from being made in Waterford) including not using preservatives. The ban on preservatives leads me to surmise that the protected geographical indication is intended to attract tourists to Waterford for the authentic fresh blaa, rather than to export blaas to other EU markets like Cork.

  9. is there also a sweet version of barm with currants?

    There very possibly is, but ‘Barm’ I’ve only encountered as savoury, with filling (and frankly the bread as bland, lacking ‘crumb’). Then the sweet version would have a different name. I’m not sure barm dough would have strength to support much by way of currantry.

  10. rather than just showing a picture

    Hmm these things look different, different sizes, and differ in texture/’crumb’ if not actual taste. So sending a picture of a roll would only have elicited a response ‘roll’. I agree asking about a “small bread roll” also would cock up the response. ‘Barm’s and ‘Baps’ are bigger/flatter than small bread rolls.

    The q should have asked about what you put in your tack/what you get from a lunch counter/in a pub or from a chippy. Oh but if you allow a bap in onion gravy that’s the slippery slope to a Yorkshire pudding in same; where will it end?

    I’m desperately trying to remember where I encountered ‘breadcake’: I think it might have been north of the border, or at least very close to it — that would explain the gap David E observes.

  11. David Marjanović says

    a bun full of thick-cut French fries

    Total Depravity is what it should be called.

  12. David Eddyshaw says

    Calvinist Fast Food! There’s just got to be an untapped market out there …
    (The Baptists are already catered for, of course.)

  13. David Eddyshaw says

    Chip bodhi?

  14. What term (and in general what dialect) is used by the national chains (markets, fast food, etc.) which sell these?

  15. wikipedia’s opinion — not sure I agree with all of it. Does remind there’s ‘stottie’.

    @Y these varieties are qualitatively different; so I expect (long time since I’ve lived in Britain) most supermarkets would have both rolls and baps. In the applicable regions they’d also have barm, cob, etc. Their deli’s seem to have ‘ciabatta’ (sourdough) these days. ‘Bun’ would usually be only sweet filling/currants.

    In general national supermarket chains try to promote themselves as local, to squeeze out specialty shops, so would also sell local variants/terms. OTOH I think McDonalds calls it ‘bun’ [#notbun] the world over — even longer time since I’ve darkened the doors of a global-chain fastfood outlet. Then I might have seen ‘barbecue bun’ or ‘burger bun’, as a concession to that … culture (for want of a better word).

  16. @David Marjanović: Indeed. What an unappetizing confection, for Calvinists or anyone. AntC’s idea of such a roll soaking in gravy sounds maybe as bad. Is there a Canadian version stuffed with poutine?

    Then again, a kaiser roll, pre-sliced and spread with margarine is apparently a traditional meal on the go in New York City. So the United States isn’t necessarily in any place to talk.

  17. John Cowan says

    (yanks hide under the table for this one)

  18. yanks hide under the table for this one

    What about Confederates?

  19. John Cowan says

    What is a Yankee?

    Anywhere else in the world, an American.

    In the South, a Northerner.

    In the North, a New Englander.

    In New England, a Vermonter.

    In Vermont, a Vermonter who has apple pie with cheese for breakfast.

  20. With the recent craze for so-called Israeli cuisine, or even “street food” in the west, two quintessentially Israeli inventions are kept strictly at home, like uncouth family: chips (a.k.a. fries) in a pita, and schnitzel in a pita.

  21. Lars Mathiesen says

    It hasn’t reached here, unless somebody has gauged the prevailing winds and called it Palestinian street food. (Anything Israeli is under a shadow). Anyway, I just wanted to say chip butty.

  22. @Y: I think schnitzel in a pita sounds great, although the vast majority of the time schnitzel is pork, and so not very Israeli seeming.

    I dined once at a brewery in Munich, with some colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics.* I ordered Wiener schnitzel, and my colleagues were surprised by how inexpensive it was. They both thought it would end up being a Wiener-style pork schnitzel, most schnitzels being, as I alluded to above, pork. However, not only did it turn out to be proper veal, but it was immense, as well as being served with four different sides.

    * I had a hard time typing this name in English. My fingers wanted to default to German fir the proper name if the Institut.

  23. Lars (the original one) says

    I am told that calling a pork schnitzel a Wienerschnitzel is illegal in Austria and Germany. Maybe only Austria.

    But in Denmark there is no such rule — if the menu doesn’t proudly say “real veal” it’s probably pork.

  24. BTW any microbiologists or industrial chemists in the house? According to this BBC Food Blog (linked from wikipedia), ‘barm’ originally meant the yeast obtained from the froth atop fermenting beer. (So far makes sense.)

    What puzzles me is “… scooped off, washed and added to bread dough in order to leaven it.” Washed froth? I can understand picking out the drowned rats that inevitably fall into open tuns in a brewery (and add definite body to the beer), but if you wash froth don’t you end up with … nothing?

  25. Classic Israeli schnitzel is made of chicken, breaded and fried, not necessarily with gravy. The thing that makes it so Israeli—not Palestinian—is the incongruous marriage of the food of Eastern European Jewish immigrants with that of the Middle East.
    The Israeli branding of Levantine hummus or North African shakshouka is another matter.

  26. Kate Bunting says

    I live in the ‘cob’ area, though being middle-class I call them rolls. However, it’s my understanding that ‘butty’ originally meant a piece of bread and butter and so, by extension, means a sandwich.

  27. What is a Yankee?

    If I might differ mildly with m’learned colleague. In the cricket-playing nations, the usual informal term is ‘Yank’, as in ‘Yanks go home’. “Outside the United States, Yank is used informally to refer to any American, including Southerners.” sez wp.

    Even though it’s a contraction of ‘Yankee’, I think most people would regard that as a different word, with more specialised meanings in the U.S. (vaguely understood): a football team, Yankee Doodle, vs Confederates, an aeroplane, … (The British school history curriculum for some reason omits mention that our ally in World Wars is a former colony. I’m not sure many could confidently distinguish nor date the War of Independence vs the Civil War. History is all wars, viewed at a long enough remove; oh and plagues.)

  28. British people over about fifty-five would probably remember 1776 for American independence because of the US celebrations that included sailing ships around Manhattan (or something) in 1976. I wonder what proportion of Brits would know the century, even, of the English civil war – it’s possibly an unfair comparison because British political & social history (or is it still taught there as English History?) is so much longer than American.

    To me ‘cob’ is mud and straw used to built cottages. I’d never eat the stuff. Cob nuts are hazel, I eat them.

  29. I associate a schnitzel (pork/chicken/whatever) in bread with Germany and particularly Hamburg, although it usually is a bun (not the kind of bun in the picture in the link, another bun, just called “Brötchen”), and not pita bread. It could be fried fish or meatballs instead, of course. So much to choose from!

    Hummous is delicious no matter which country it comes from. For a while I could get hummous with various flavours added from a store close by, but now I just find the original flavour. I was quite fond of the red beet hummous, because of the nice pink-red colour.

  30. I wonder what proportion of Brits would know the century, even, of the English civil war

    There’s only two dates to remember with British history: 1066 and 1666.

    The latter was the Fire of London/brought an end to the plague/the day was saved by the newly-restored Monarchy (and Samuel Pepys’ diary). There was an awful lot of History in that Century.

    How many Brits would know there were two Revolutions in that same Century?

  31. You’d think the memorable date 1688 as well as the name Glorious Revolution would make it stick in people’s memories. And it’s more significant than 1066 is, both to Britain as a unit and to religious groups; as well as being far better documented, for obvious reasons. And yet it has always been a blurry background thing to most people (i.e. me).

  32. I associate a schnitzel (pork/chicken/whatever) in bread with Germany

    I associate it with Argentina, where I spent several formative years. Just looking at that photo makes me nostalgic.

  33. Ben Tolley says

    I think the Civil War is one of the few thing most English (I won’t venture as far as British) people would be able to date at least approximately. I remember my own history lessons at school (in the 80s and 90s) as a never-ending cycle of Norman Conquest – Tudors and Stuarts (though that seemed to end with the Civil War – there was barely a mention of the Restoration and nothing about anything after) – Industrial Revolution – WWII. That may not be entirely fair – I have vague memories of learning something about the Wars of the Roses, and when I was 11 or 12 we had a whole term on origins and early spread of Islam, which was by far the most interesting thing we ever did.

    I’m right on the cob/bap border, and do use both – but they mean different things (a cob has a hard crust and a bap doesn’t, and if I had to refer to both together, I’d say rolls). I’d agree that a chip butty is in a category of its own; it’s a butty even if you don’t use the word otherwise. For me as for AntC, it has to be sweet to be a bun.

  34. I’ve since decided that bun is acceptable. Americans use the expression hamburger bun and no one thinks sugar & currants (no more sugar than other McDonald’s-type American food anyway).

    I think the Civil War is one of the few thing most English (I won’t venture as far as British) people would be able to date at least approximately.
    I went to primary & secondary school in England. I know that Charles had his head chopped off in 1649 and that Charles 2 returned in 1660 (even that Cromwell 1 died about 1658) but without looking it up I can’t tell you when the civil war started. Approximately 1636? We never covered the battles. I even passed A-Level History but that syllabus started at 1763 or thereabouts, with George 3. The Wars of the Roses we did in English (because Shakespeare).

  35. You’d think the memorable date 1688

    Naw not enough 6’s.

    as well as the name Glorious Revolution would make it stick in people’s memories.

    Naw not enough bloodshed. Whereas there are battle sites from the Civil War all over the place; Cavaliers and Roundheads; off with the King’s head; pure theatre.

    And it’s more significant than 1066 is, both to Britain as a unit and to religious groups;

    Hmm? There’s still plenty of Norman Castles and Abbeys around the countryside; not to mention 60% of the vocab. I’m not a member of no religious group so wouldn’t know/wouldn’t care; they’re a tendentious lot; ref previous threads on their scriptural minutiae.

    as well as being far better documented, for obvious reasons.

    That would be the sort of documents and history those who tangle up centuries wouldn’t pay attention to.

    It’s not good for your posterity to be a sensible-head; an able administrator, and bringer of peace: needs more drama.

  36. All good points, Ant. It cannot compete with all the sixes. I’m not in no religious groups neither, I’m just surprised the only ones who care are the King Billy lot in bowler hats.

  37. The Orange marches on the Twelfth of July originally commemorated the Battle of Aughrim (12 July OS 1691) the decisive battle in the Jacobite~Williamite War. Since the calendar change of 1752, they commemorate the Battle of the Boyne (12 July NS 1690) which was more picturesque, featuring as it did both kings on the battlefield.

    The proverbial Irish expression “where Aughrim was lost” alludes not to some Irish equivalent of the playing fields of Eton but rather, as every schoolchild knows, to when “St. Ruth lost his head”.

  38. Every other Wikilanguage calls him that, but the English-language one has him as “Saint-Ruhe”; I wonder how well grounded the “correction” is.

  39. Trond Engen says

    The reason is explained under Background and family, including reference to sources (but I’m not going to check them).

  40. Trond Engen says

    I forgot to paste the paragraph. The short version is that he’s believed to be from a family of that name in the region of Deux-Sèvres.

  41. Yes, I saw that, but he could have changed the spelling of his name for reasons of his own. I find it odd that French Wikipedia would have him by an incorrect name.

  42. I mean, the Brontë sisters were descended from the Brunty family, but we don’t go retrospectively changing their name on that account.

  43. John Cowan says

    It’s not good for your posterity to be a sensible-head; an able administrator, and bringer of peace

    Au contraire, it is good for your posterity. Consider Louis XI (1423-83), called the Spider King both because of the royal roads he built and because of his network of royal officers (spies, if you like) who kept him well-informed of the doings in all of his kingdom. He had one sharp lesson when he was young in the trouble that behaving impulsively can get you into (princes often do), but he actually learned from it. He quelched for his own reign at least the perpetual French civil war (his son had to fight an alliance of high-end nobles, but he won), built up France economically, cleaned up a lot of local corruption, appointed administrators for ability rather than rank and actually paid them, took an intelligent interest in 15C science (including astrology), and was able to end the Hundred Years War (as he said himself) not by force of arms, but by force of pâté, venison, and good French wine.

    He may not be as famous as the later Louises, but when it comes to good works he outshone them all. And if nobody loved him (not even his wife) and he died unmourned, he had managed the transition from mediaeval France to early modern France as well as anyone possibly could have.

  44. This guy slipped through the cracks of fame, General Godert de Ginkell, later Earl of Athlone. Shouldn’t he be as well known as the duke of Marlborough?

  45. David Eddyshaw says

    David the Builder (not to be confused with Bob) might count too:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_IV_of_Georgia

  46. Goodness. Nice handwriting for the 11-12C. I wonder what sort of pen he was using.

  47. kaiser roll, pre-sliced and spread with margarine is apparently a traditional meal on the go in New York City

    Really? Is this still a thing?

  48. @John Cowan: Despite his constant conniving, Louis XI was known as “Louis the Prudent” for good reason. The sobriquet also explicitly contrasts with that of arch-rival, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy. (Ironically, before his ascension as king of France, Louis, after repeated revolts against his father, had been forced to take refuge with Charles the Bold’s father Phillip.) Charles brought an end to independent Burgundy through his own “bold” foolishness, by invading Switzerland at a time when Swiss pikemen were Europe’s best troops. A major component of Louis’ “prudence” was just not doing anything so blatantly self destructive.

  49. He may not be as famous as the later Louises

    Thus proving the point you were Au contrairing.

  50. “Oh but if you allow a bap in onion gravy that’s the slippery slope to a Yorkshire pudding in same; where will it end?”
    My experience is that the gravy goes in the Yorkshire Pudding rather than the other way round. And so does the meat.

  51. @languagehat: What does Louis the Spider’s personal fame have to do with the matter?

  52. patio furniture since some slack-jawed bimbo mixed up a sideboard and credenza.

    Although I’m familiar with sideboards, aged I think 67 I have still never seen any furniture I could identify as a credenza. The first time I saw the word was on the American architectural licencing exam in the early 1980s when we were supposed to place a credenza in some office we were designing. But what was it: a chair, a pet, an Italian sports car? They said even then that too few people from poor backgrounds were becoming architects.

  53. @languagehat: What does Louis the Spider’s personal fame have to do with the matter?

    AntC’s “It’s not good for your posterity to be a sensible-head; an able administrator, and bringer of peace: needs more drama” seems to me to clearly imply that “posterity” = “personal fame.”

  54. Merci!

  55. David Marjanović says

    I am told that calling a pork schnitzel a Wienerschnitzel is illegal in Austria and Germany. Maybe only Austria.

    Schnitzel nach Wiener Art, “of the Viennese kind”, is what my cafeteria in Berlin (before the plague) called the pork version. But outside of restaurants (or maybe only upscale restaurants, but that’s most of them) pork is the default; indeed Schnitzel without further qualifiers is the pork version by default (but Rindschnitzel is beef without breading, generally with pasta and a sauce… but Hühnerschnitzel is very much breaded chicken… but Putenschnitzel is turkey without breading, fried with garlic and served with rice…).

    not necessarily with gravy

    …So it’s not just the Germans who haven’t noticed that the point of the breading is that you don’t need any sauce with it whatsoever, because the breading keeps the moisture in during frying.

    (Also, bonne viande, courte sauce.)

    schnitzel (pork/chicken/whatever) in bread

    Schnitzel on bread is not unknown in Austria, but much more often it’s in a roll: Schnitzelsemmel.

    I associate it with Argentina

    From the article:

    The dish shares many similarities with the Austrian Wiener schnitzel and the American chicken fried steak. However, milanesa has its roots in Italy, and the original dish has been traced to the city of Milan and the famous cotoletta alla milanese.

    …That’s exactly where the Viennese version comes from. And the fried egg on top has been known to occur in Germany in restaurants good enough that they don’t add any sauce (I’m thinking of a pub in Berlin actually).

    He may not be as famous as the later Louises

    Yeah, I misread XI as IX at first, having barely heard of XI.

  56. And the fried egg on top has been known to occur in Germany in restaurants good enough that they don’t add any sauce

    Milanesa never has sauce — I shudder at the idea.

  57. PlasticPaddy says

    Ask for a slice of lemon if they do not bring you one, though.

  58. Milanesa never has sauce

    No, but katsukarē (カツカレー) does, with rice and tsukemono on the side, and it is quite good. I would take a good katsukarē over a Wiener Schnitzel most days to be honest.

  59. I love this side view of Louis XI, btw. It’s in a private US collection and is “newly attributed” to someone called Jacob de Litemont, an artist to the king with no other known portraits to his name, so I don’t buy that. The great problem with attribution is that if you want to prove someone painted something nearly 600 years ago, you’re working with a very small body of potential evidence and there isn’t much room for speculation (lots of money may be influencing the answer too). It says the French broke away earlier than the Italians from painting side-view, mugshotlike portraits like this one (1451) by Piero della Francesca and they started making 3/4-view portraits but doesn’t explain why this painter reverted.

    If you block out the clothing with your fingers, Louis XI could be someone from today. It’s only tiny, 11×14 inches, but I think it’s more lifelike than the Piero. It also has a bit less of that Exorcist look, the head seeming to be back-to-front on the body that comes from the design of the outfits’ necks.

  60. I love this side view of Louis XI, btw.

    Yes, very nice. The hat is spiffy, but maybe a little low-rent for a king. What’s the matter, he couldn’t afford ermine?

  61. “The hat” – yes, is it in two parts held together by velcro or buttons? How about a crown, next time?

  62. John Cowan says

    Hühnerschnitzel is very much breaded chicken

    I made it a few days ago, in fact, but baked in the oven instead of fried. It still doesn’t need any sauce, though I have sometimes used sauce to resuscitate the leftovers when just reheating them would be drying. Nowadays I just microwave them with a glass of water in the ‘wave, putting both underneath the plastic cover I use for most food there. This steams them without the risk of the crumbs falling through a conventional steamer into the water below.

    (Or what I thought was conventional. Googling now for [steamer cooking] shows me specially made pots, closer to what I’d call a double boiler. This is what I meant; it works great with any pot that (still) has a tight-fitting lid (but not hermetically sealed, please).

    How about a crown, next time?

    Crowns are heavy (though not AJP ones). You don’t want to wear them unless you must for that particular occasion.

  63. You don’t want to wear them unless you must for that particular occasion.
    And what more appropriate occasion could there be than when you’re having your portrait painted? Though according to the – not very convincing – Weiss description, French painters were shooting for naturalism by that time.

  64. “Your Majesty, if I might suggest…. that crown makes your head look just a teensy bit lopsided. How about this prop hat I happen to have in the studio? Yes, perfect, hold still…”

  65. Trond Engen says

    The display of the crown (and gold and jewels in general) has gone in and out of fashion through the ages. I don’t know if it’s reflecting the ruling ideals of kingship or carefully designed desinformation — substituting the image of great power when the reality is weakness or decay, and the image of humility or workmanship when the reality is negligence.

  66. In Lucian Freud’s portrait of the queen, the crown is the only good bit. And that bit is very good, but you get the impression that he might have been a small-R republican (it’s the only official portrait where she hasn’t shaved recently).

  67. Here is a remarkably inept (even I could have done it better) and naively rendered crown on the head of Edward I. The painter has placed all the points of the crown that are round the back in between the front-side points; in other words taking no account of perspective. Possibly it alludes to heraldry (this is the sort of thing you can say as an art critic, you cover yourself with a footnote “Possibly not”).

  68. @languagehat: Practically every portrait of Louis the Prudent that I can find online has him wearing a brimmed hat like that. I suspect it was actually a personal trademark of his, but also representative of the style at the time. His father, Charles VII, is usually depicted in a much more ostentatious brimmed hat. (See also this nineteenth-century cartoon of Charles, showing the same hat.)

    @AJP Crown: To me, the oddities of the crown in that portrait seem barely noticeable compared with Edward’s lazy eye.

  69. Your Majesty, if I might suggest…

    on the other hand, the painter evidently didn’t have any qualms about depicting His Majesty’s humongous schnozz

  70. Good point, Brett. Especially since it was painted a couple of hundred years after Edward’s death. Stephen had the same ailment, apparently. Perhaps there’s some hereditary lazy royal eye thing (DE might know) that everyone knew about.

  71. His Majesty’s humongous schnozz

    In some cultures (Italian) this is seen as an advantage.

  72. PlasticPaddy says

    @brett, ajp
    Vous savez pourquoi le roi porte toujours un chapeau épais ?

    Pour amortir le choc en cas de convulsions et de chute sur la tête !

    Oui. La plus terrible des maladies qui frappe Louis, c’est l’épilepsie. Il fait une première crise en 1480.

    source: https://fr.anecdotrip.com/le-roi-au-chapeau-5-anecdotes-sur-la-mort-de-louis-xi-au-plessis-les-tours-par-vinaigrette

  73. Oh. Hémorroïdes, maladie de peau, épilepsie. Le pauvre homme. Il porte un drôle de chapeau quand même.

  74. Lars (the original one) says

    Don’t diss the gravy. A good schnitzel does not need it, as long as there’s lemon and horseradish and capers and the potatoes haven’t been cooked dry, but the other day I had a nice burger with a liberal dose of gravy poured over. It’s a North Jutland tradition, but I’m ready to forgive them much for bringing it to Copenhagen.

  75. I just received a compliment on my own hat, which reminded that I too make a felt hat a basic element of my attire, and have done so, on and off, for over twenty years. So perhaps I should not mock old Louis. On the other hand, I wear my hats* mostly to keep the sun out of my eyes, while Louis’ hat doesn’t look like it had enough of a brim to do that.

    * This is about the fifth one I’ve gone through. They don’t last forever, particularly if they get rained on a lot. After a few years, they wear out and/or get forgotten at Schiphol airport. They have all been pretty much identical, except for the colors, the styles of the bands, and the branding; I suspect that many of the companies that sell this design (part Australian, part Indiana Jones) actually get them cut, molded, and stitchted at the same factory. The current incarnation is this brand, in olive; but if you pay the list price of $50 for one of them, you are getting ripped off.

  76. I still mourn the Panama — the most expensive hat I’d ever had, “a real Panama from Ecuador, made from the leaves of the jipijapa,” as Daddy Joe (my grandfather) used to say — that I stupidly wore to impress a woman in Philadelphia; I got caught in a torrential downpour and it was ruined.

  77. David Marjanović says

    Ask for a slice of lemon if they do not bring you one, though.

    Even in Berlin they bring you one. Except it’s not a slice, it’s a sector, as it should be.

    “The hat” – yes, is it in two parts held together by velcro or buttons?

    The king is wearing one of those medieval caps, and then a hat on top of that.

  78. David Eddyshaw says

    They set light to my St Helena hat in Milan airport. I’ve never really got over it.

  79. They what now? Remind me never to visit Milan. At least in London all you get is pigeons shitting on you.

  80. it’s not a slice, it’s a sector

    English seems to lack a common word for the individual segments/sacs/wedges of a citrus fruit. In Hebrew there’s a totally everyday word for this (pelakh), but I’m not even sure how I would most naturally refer to it in English, other than the vague “piece”.

  81. David Marjanović says

    Speigerl, both for the natural parts of an orange and for cuttings of an apple. I actually have no idea how to render this even in Standard German.

    Edit: when I clicked on “Post Comment”, I was enlightened noticed I had just compared apples and oranges. Well. We’ll get to the oranges of this comparison… the oranges… how it started.

  82. January First-of-May says

    English seems to lack a common word for the individual segments/sacs/wedges of a citrus fruit.

    This is долька in Russian, also a totally everyday word, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a segment of a lemon that I did not separate myself (for some weird reason I quite enjoy the taste of lemons).
    (These segments are not to be confused with лимонные дольки, a popular candy that looks like [and might well originate from] sugar-covered half-slices of lemon, and is the Russian version of Dumbledore’s “lemon drops” aka “sherbet lemons”.)

    Restaurants, in my (admittedly quite limited) experience, tend to offer an actual sector – typically a quarter (which is convenient to cut).

  83. Brett and everybody, here’s a video of the dashingly hatted Roy Chapman Andrews, the model for Indiana Jones.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDdqd8c_-hY

  84. English seems to lack a common word for the individual segments/sacs/wedges of a citrus fruit.

    Segment is the usual word in my relatively standard American English for the a piece that’s separated from the fruit along natural divisions after peeling, but I’ve never seen someone do that to a lemon. The pieces you get by cutting the fruit (with peel) can be wedges, or slices if they’re disk-shaped.

  85. David Eddyshaw says

    That matches my own usage exactly. You can’t, like, make a segment, dude. They’re given to you by the Universe.

  86. Lars (the original one) says

    Danish citronbåd for a wedge. I have been known to peel a lemon and eat it in segments, but I don’t think there’s a separate term of art for those. (A can of preserved tangerines call them ‘boats’ as well).

    Also I forgot the most important ingredient of the schnitzel accessory: boneless herring. It has to be served on a lemon slice (not wedge) with the herring curved around the edge so it can hold a little heap of capers, with grated horseradish on top. It’s called a dreng = ‘boy,’ but I’ve lost linking privileges it seems. Google Wienerschnitzel – hvorfor hedder det en dreng? and you might get lucky — there’s a nice picture as well. But actually it’s the mandatory peas that make sauce unnecessary.

    Also also, a real German Ecuadorean Panama hat is nice to have, but expensive. (Mayser makes them from unshaped roughs that are pleated in Ecuador, I was told). Though the Borsalino was dearer.

  87. David Marjanović says

    Peas… herring… capers… horseradish… *backing away slowly while muttering wohl den Dänen und denen, denen die Dänen wohl sind*

  88. I don’t get the peas, but the rest sound like delicious garnish.

  89. I still mourn the Panama — the most expensive hat I’d ever had, “a real Panama from Ecuador, made from the leaves of the jipijapa,” as Daddy Joe (my grandfather) used to say — that I stupidly wore to impress a woman in Philadelphia

    Women also create impressive hat-effects, of course. See the illustration at

    https://jonathanmorse.blog/2018/10/28/the-historical-novel-has-something-for-everybody-hats-cheekbones-nazis-and-a-national-geographic-breast-detour-through-asia/

  90. For decades, I remembered practically nothing about the 1982 CBS production of Witness for the Prosecution (which I saw as I child when it first aired) except Diana Rigg’s stylish hat.

  91. On the subject of weird royal hats: Take gander at this unusual headpiece worn by John VIII, one of the last Byzantine emperors. It combines a brim and raised central section that would each be fairly unusual on its own, but together they are pretty bizarre On the emperor’s own Wikipedia page, there are several more depictions of him wearing it, which suggest that the medal’s version may be a bit exaggerated, but that it does capture the overall shape. It was not, apparently, a commonplace hat design, at least in Italy—where John, like many of the late Christian emperors of Constantinople, traveled to try to raise support for the doomed defense against the Ottomans. The hat appears, on the head of the Pontius Pilate figure in Piero della Francesca’s* Flagellation of Christ, and the hat was evidently unique enough that it has led to people interpreting the depiction of Pilate as an allegory for John VIII. (Of course, no one really knows what the fully allegorical interpretation of the that painting was ultimately intended to be, however. The figures on the right are traditionally interpreted as being portraits of the assassinated Duke Oddantonio of Urbino and his advisors, but what that portraiture was supposed to imply is unclear.)

    John VIII can apparently also be seen in another, more famous, Biblical painting that also used the faces of contemporary political figures—one of the murals in the Medici family’s Magi Chapel, by Benozzo Gozzoli. That picture apparently shows John VIII as one of the magi who are the core figures of the murals. However, the crown he is wearing is possibly even stranger than the actual hat that John VIII wore. It looks like Gozzoli tried to combined a traditional European radiate crown with the headwear used by the some Asiatic rulers emperors and, with the rolls of fabric around the sides.

    * Piero della Francesca is probably best known to people my age for being mentioned by Egon at the end of Ghostbusters II. I don’t think his Flagellation of Chirst is particularly interesting, except for the way it shows off the artist’s perfect use of perspective.

  92. Bathrobe says

    I’d love a hat like that!

  93. John Cowan says

    seems to me to clearly imply that “posterity” = “personal fame.”

    Probably that is what AntC meant, but I intended the literal sense of ‘offspring’, though it seems that none of his offspring had legitimate descendants in more than the 2nd degree. Metaphorically, his posterity are the French who came after him, and that’s good enough.

  94. I just found a copy of the Loeb edition of Aulus Gellius’s Noctes Atticae at a used bookstore, for which I’d been keeping my eyes open for many years. The format is strikingly similar to this blog: short musings on language, literature (Greek, not Russian), and some utterly random topis, in no particular order, and even back-and-forth conversations on the topics at hand (conducted in person). This led me to think, what would you call Hattic Nights in Latin? Turns out, I can not find a generic word for ‘hat’ in Classical Latin. There are words for specific types, but nothing earlier than the medieval generic capellus.

  95. I wrote here about “Aulus Gellius (who sounds like an interesting fellow I should investigate further”; alas, I never did. Maybe someday!

  96. And I wrote about the Noctes Ambrosianae here, for any indiscriminate fans of Noctes.

  97. Gellius is easy reading, even for me, who is not immersed in the Romans and Greeks and don’t know much of what he’s talking about. He’s just a modest young intellectual, not at all trying to be a big shot. It’s the only work of Classical literature I know of that feels intimate. Each chapter is one or three pages of a Lowe edition, a good dose if you’re just trying to get a bit of reading here and there.

  98. Here is a (historically important) portrait of another monarch with both a silly high crown (apparently having copied the high-arching bow from the crown of the contemporary king of Bohemia) and poorly aligned eyes.

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