A Facebook post from Nick Nicholas baffled me by mentioning “a ham and cheese jaffle”; Wiktionary told me that a jaffle is “(Australia, South Africa) A type of toasted sandwich that is sealed around the edge (in one piece, and not separated in the centre), it has a filling, for example an egg.” Their etymology is “From a trademark for a utensil that creates jaffles”; the OED (which added the word in 2007) says “Of unknown origin.” (First citation: 1950 “A ‘Jaffle’ is actually a sealed, toasted sandwich,” Hardware Journal May 50.) You can see one — Nick’s own, in fact — at his subsequent post. I also enjoyed his cultural/linguistic observation “I am smirking because I’ve just had a service interaction in Greece, and being culturally Anglo, it is always a relief for me to be addressed here in the formal plural, by cab drivers and serving staff. It’s not like Greeks are eager to be formal in addressing you, so I take my politeness plural where I can.”
Not really Hattic material, but Fara Dabhoiwala’s “A Man of Parts and Learning” (LRB, Vol. 46 No. 22 · 21 November 2024; archived) is so good I have to recommend it. What a story!
The Fara Dabhoiwala piece is indeed interesting.
What a story, indeed. Thanks!
“Jaffle” was trademarked in Australia in 1949/1950, so the WAry definition is not as circular as it first seems.
I think I have seen a jaffle iron at my grandparents’ house, though my grandma called their its product a croque monsieur. Probably my grandfather’s relatives in Australia sent them.
I can’t access Nicholas’s posts. I am not on FB.
It looked like this.
Y: I think I have seen a jaffle iron
Ah! So probably meant to rhyme with ‘waffle’.
So whence the j-? I want to say ‘jam’, but that doesn’t fit with well-documented practice.
Jaw? Have a jawfull?
The part about proportions reminded me of this instruction for drawing a person.
Wikt says the pronunciation is /ˈd͡ʒæfl̩/.
jaffle is “(Australia, South Africa)
And although I’m familiar enough in NZ with the griddle-thing and the croque-monsieur-alike, I’ve never heard ‘jaffle’ here [**]. The result is a ‘toasted sarnie’ (or ‘sammie’). You don’t necessarily get a diagonal crease.
The device is square/to take standard sandwich loaf, not a ‘flying saucer’ per Y’s illustration. Every cafe has them. Ah! Wikip has circular jaffles as ‘Regional variants’ of ‘Pie-irons’. Also a ‘Haggis toasted sandwich’ — perhaps our Northern correspondents could verify?
[**] Here’s a theory why: ‘Jaf(f)a’ is an insult to our largest city/its inhabitants ‘Just Another FF’in Aucklander’. [Greens says 1990’s. I’m pretty sure it’s a lot older than that, but 1950’s I doubt.]
Wikt says the pronunciation is /ˈd͡ʒæfl̩/.
And so it is, all over Ozland at least.
It looked like this [round].
In my experience the square format has been far more common, over the years. Accommodates slices of bread better.
I like very much the story about Williams and his portraitist, Williams. The painting betrays a self-taught artist. It is not just the proportions of the body: the artist never got the hang of perspective, and in this case probably did not use the camera obscura: the furniture looks like it will fall over, the window frame is askew and unsquare, and tilted books are lost in space. And yet the artist learned to pay close attention to the facial expression. The face is convincingly real, and its expression is precise and dignified. That alone should have eliminated the idea of the painting being a travesty or a mockery.
There is a hattic angle, btw. Williams (the painter) was interested in learning indigenous languages. Did he write anything about that?
When I was a kid in the US Midwest in the 1970s and 80s, my family used to go camping very frequently, and we used those things over the campfire all the time. We called them “pie irons”, though, and we usually filled them with pizza toppings (sauce, mozzarella cheese, pepperoni), and used cheap hamburger buns for the bread (our irons were round).
I can’t see the facebook posts either, but I would like to, because I am very puzzled by why anyone would be relieved to be addressed in a formal form of the second person, culturally Anglo or otherwise. Is it because he never developed a good linguistic command of the informal form, and therefore finds it easier to converse in the formal?
Possibly strangers he found mildly repulsive insisted on addressing him informally, as part of a real or feigned expression of bonhomie. This can be done in English, as well. A Monty Python sketch has a character with a catchphrase “Nudge nudge wink wink say no more (eh)”.
William Williams’ Williams. I’m gobsmacked.
But then I’m no Art Historian. Is it possible there’s over-much wishful thinking in Dabhoiwala’s piece?
“the V&A’s scientific team” seem not to have arrived at the same conclusions — which is not to say they’ve arrived at contrary conclusions. I might be nit-picking minutiae, but that’s a long stretch from the few letters they could make out on the spine of a book to Dabhoiwala’s reconstruction.
OTOH the Philosophy third edition (only) page 521 must be incontrovertible to someone who knows what they’re looking at. (Not me: I can’t tie it up to images online.) Dense mathematics as smoking gun (with a triple layer of underpainting, in the library).
Hat: Wikt says the pronunciation is /ˈd͡ʒæfl̩/.
Of course. I meant to say that when the name was coined in the fifties (or whenever), it was formed after ‘waffle’. I imagine that the coiners meant the pronunciations to rhyme as well, but it could also have been purely visual.
Either way, that may be all there is to it, or there could also be an explanation for the j-. We’d probably need the original ads to tell.
English conflates politeness with friendliness; mainland Europe, very broadly speaking, conflates politeness with distance instead, and that means talking to a random adult stranger like you’ve known them for years is not polite, but unsettling. (If you’re combative enough – but few people are – your reaction is likely to be “I’m not your buddy, pal”.)
The trick here is that this is not a static picture. In Spain, the definition of “random stranger” for this purpose has contracted pretty dramatically over the last half-century. Maybe the same has been going on in Greece. (It’s been going on everywhere to some extent.)
No wonder – the text says p. 521 is near the end of the book, but the painting shows it in the middle, so I suspect the painting contains a symbolic representation of p. 521 instead of actually depicting that page, even apart from the fact that the original (entirely in Latin) is highly unlikely to say “NEWTON’S PHILOSOPHY” at the top of each spread.
Is it because he never developed a good linguistic command of the informal form, and therefore finds it easier to converse in the formal?
He’s a native speaker of Greek. And there’s no need to see the FB post, since I quoted the entire text; he explicitly says “being culturally Anglo, it is always a relief for me to be addressed here in the formal plural.” What part of that is unclear?