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?
(If you’re combative enough – but few people are – …
<* raises arm and waves vigorously *>
This world is overrun by Impertinenzbestien. Probably the next as well, for obvious reasons.
FWIW, one cannot see the facebook posts in question unless one is a “friend” (for Facebook purposes) of opoudjis, due to the privacy settings. His most recent facebook post that can be seen by all and sundry is from Jan. 19, 2024 and concerns a meal at the Hanoi outpost of Pizza Hut. (LBJ’s long-game revenge on Ho Chi Minh?)
I for one am willing to assume arguendo that hat has indeed accurately quoted the posts in question.
FWIW, one cannot see the facebook posts in question unless one is a “friend” (for Facebook purposes) of opoudjis, due to the privacy settings.
Sorry about that, I didn’t realize. But there’s no need to see them; I merely linked them as sources. I copy-and-pasted the text.
“jaffle is (Australia, South Africa)”
not S. African though, never heard it there in 30 years of growing up..
Impertinenzbestien is a great word..
“jaffle is (Australia, South Africa)”
not S. African though, never heard it there in 30 years of growing up..
=====
Use Google’s Advanced Search to retrieve instances of the singular and plural forms of that word; limit the search to South Africa; and you will find quite a number of South African instances.
If on some of the websites you see no outright mention of South Africa, search for an email address (under “CONTACT US,” for example) and you will find ZA, the Internet country code for South Africa.
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.
The part about English is “very broadly speaking” too. Yes, in a lot of circles, using friendly or literally familiar vocatives is polite with strangers, at least between men or boys and when talking to children. But by no means in all circles and circumstances. For instance, a woman being polite to a strange man is very unlikely to use any vocative but “sir” or his name (if she knows it), in my experience.
But to answer Hat’s question, I think something is unclear about “being culturally Anglo, it is always a relief for me to be addressed here in the formal plural,” namely what the connection is. I suspect it’s more personal or subcultural than cultural. I’m pretty sure that in every predominantly English-speaking country, a large fraction of men are comfortable with being called “dude”, “bro”, “bruv”, “mate”, or some such by strangers–maybe mostly by strangers of their own race or other social group.
One pattern I’ve noticed when talking with younger male employees of businesses I’m patronizing (interesting word), who have probably been instructed to call us gray-haired men “sir”, is that after a “sir” or three they switch to “man”. I assume they get tired of “sir” and feel “man” to be more suitable for gray-haired male customers than “dude”, “buddy”, etc. Is this just a New Mexico thing, or do people notice it in other places?
I was just now buying something at Best Buy, and at the checkout, the young black man helping me greeted me, a distinctly old gray-haired gentleman, with ‘hey bro.’ I felt honored.
67yo Australian here
In restaurants it’s common for a young waiter to address the group at the table as “guys”. By now I take this as pretty neutral.
@david marjanovic
My sense is that the scope of the polite plural address is much narrower in Greek than in for example French or German.
For example, poster on an Athens train, 1970s, advertising the government lottery: “you [singular] too can become rich!”
Deckhand on car ferry, marshalling the cars to drive off, calls out to the first driver in the queue: “Come! [singular]”
The Easy German podcast is structured around the presenters – woman of about 30, man of about 50 – accosting passersby in the street to engage in short conversations about the topic of the day. Mostly in Berlin I think or at any rate in big cities.
For them it seems that almost anyone under 40 is “du”. I’d love to know more about how they make those judgements and whether that’s normal.
My family also had pie irons for making pizza pockets for camping and cookouts. Ours were square and just the right size for slices of sandwich bread.
Although I knew pie irons was the traditional term for them, nobody actually seemed to call them that. It sounds like something out of Sons and Lovers. I think my parents settled on “sandwich makers,” and our Scoutmaster had a different name for them.
Ah. German has reached that point, but only in the last 25 to 30 years; until then it was unthinkable. …That might actually have been a backlash to the 1930s, when the political extremes did address voters-and-such in the informal singular.
Still not in German.
That is the truly weird part.
It is more or less normal nowadays, but 20 years ago the age cutoff was more like 20.
So if you’re let’s say 40 – or whatever age puts you on the cusp – and a same-age stranger addresses you as “Sie”, is that a moment of truth when you think “I must be getting old”?
Like when people start offering you a seat on a crowded train.
It’s handy that English doesn’t have to worry about that (at least in relation to du/Sie etc – there are of course other polite language decision points, like in my comment about waiters in restaurants, but they’re easier to avoid if in doubt).
Like when people start offering you a seat on a crowded train
So far, this has only happened to me in France and Spain, not in the UK or Germany. I am unclear as to quite what conclusions could be drawn from this. Perhaps it is something to do with my fashion sense.
[It would certainly have happened to me even thirty years ago in Ghana, had the matter ever actually arisen. Young People are brung up proper in those parts.]
Mooré (unlike Kusaal) uses second-person-plural for politeness, but my level of conversational Mooré never got to a level where it mattered; I only ever got as far as people being agreeably impressed by the fact that I could say anything comprehensible in the language at all.
It’s handy that English doesn’t have to worry about that (at least in relation to du/Sie etc […]
I would like to state for the record that tu/usted is the hardest part of Spanish. You can offend people by getting it wrong either way, usage differs by region and other things, and a lot of people don’t give me any guidance when I ask them.
The nearest thing in Kusaal to this kind of minefield is picking the right vocative term to address people by (the actual pronoun usage is straightforward enough.) It’s not obvious, for example, that you ought to address an unrelated woman of your own age as “my mother-in-law” to avoid offence … and it won’t go down well if you overestimate her age and call her “my mother.” Even if she actually is a young woman, you’ll only get away with calling her “young woman” if you yourself are plainly past it, and of an age where she can call you “my father.” She might just call you “white man”, anyway. That’s perfectly polite (assuming that you are one.)
Actually, the main thing you need to get your head around is that you have to take a whole lot more trouble over being polite than you’re used to. What you imagine to be a cheery (if brief) greeting may easily come over as disdainful brusqueness, typical of a bloody foreigner.
Joseph Keenan’s Breaking Out of Beginner’s Spanish (too modest of a title for the best usage guide I know for any language) says, as rule of thumb, that if you would address someone by their first name, use tú, and vice versa.
@Brett:
Although I knew pie irons was the traditional term for them, nobody actually seemed to call them that. It sounds like something out of Sons and Lovers. I think my parents settled on “sandwich makers,” and our Scoutmaster had a different name for them.
I suspect my family called them “pie irons” for multiple reasons: they were called that on the packaging when we bought them; we didn’t really have anything else good to call them; and we thought it was kind of a funny name for them. In any case, we liked the pizzas made in them, so we used them frequently.
Oh yes, this holds across Europe these days; it’s a 1 : 1 identity in large parts of German. To me, in fact, deviations from this feel nothing short of ungrammatical.
But that doesn’t help you find out where to draw the line in the first place. It just means there’s only one, not two.
More like “I’m coming across as a serious adult now” because you still have the cutoff of 20 years ago in your mind. 🙂
Even back then, though, university bureaucrats and students were per Sie with each other, even if both the student and the clerk/intern were both 18.
For example, poster on an Athens train, 1970s, advertising the government lottery: “you [singular] too can become rich!”
Ah. German has reached that point, but only in the last 25 to 30 years; until then it was unthinkable.
I think I am about 20 years older than DM and to me it still grates when instructions, web sites or information signs address me with the informal pronoun*). I can ignore that with advertisements (I just assume I’m not meant).
I think we may have discussed this before; there is a boundary area where addressing a group with the informal Ihr is fine, but it would be impolite to address any member of that group with informal Du.
*) It doesn’t grate if the context is clearly youth-oriented; it’s my own fault for going there 🙂
University professors do that sometimes – because there’s no other way to make clear the whole audience is meant.
There was one teacher at my high school who liked students to address her by her first name. We discussed her case in German class, and Herr Chapman said that it would be technically correct to address her as “du,” but it would be very strange.
On another, historical weird case, Hitler was known for essentially never using “du” with adult men, even those who he was, in the right social circumstances, on a first name basis with. The sole exception was Röhm, and we all know how that turned out.
I think we have discussed this before, but I’m too lazy to search it – the rule du plus first name and Sie with second name is quite strict; the only exceptions are Sie plus first name in dubbed versions of English lanuage movies and shows (which is an accepted convention but sounds totally unnatural outside of that context, and if Hitler did that*), it would have been seen as a personal eccentricity) and du plus last name used by children of preschool and early elementary school age; I have also encountered it in rural/small-town Northern Germany used by salespersons and similar service personnel with colleagues (“Frau Müller, kannst du Kasse 3 übernehmen?”). This usage may be carried over from Low German, where the formal pronoun used to be used only for high-status persons like officials or clerics.
*) Not that I doubt Brett, it’s just the first time I encounter that information.
“Frau Müller, kannst du Kasse 3 übernehmen?”
This is standard at every German supermarket I know in Cologne. It’s a compromise between the familiar “du” used between employees who know each other well, and the use of full names to suggest a professional/detached attitude.
As explained to me once by an Edeka manager, this is intended to heighten the apparent politeness level, without forcing employees to use “Sie” with each other. By the same means, customers don’t learn the first names of employees, so they can’t use them to be even bossier and ruder towards employees than they already are.
Familiarity breeds contempt. That’s the belief at the base of these “Sie” and “du” conventions.
By that I mean: when A is over-familiar or otherwise culpably heedless towards B, B experiences contempt towards A. That should explain my use of the contemptuous expression Impertinenzbestie.
Ah, interesting, because I’ve seen it called Münchner Du…
Good to know it’s real, though. I’ve never encountered it.
In some places there are people who do this – allegedly called Hamburger Sie – asymmetrically toward people of transitional age, i.e. around 18. And I’ve encountered one teacher of German as a foreign language who did this; he had two brothers in his class, so using last names consistently wasn’t an option.
The reason for the dubbing convention must be that often in English, or at least in the US, first names are used in situations that would call, or would have called at the time, for last names + Sie in German, so the first dubbers reached for a compromise.
Münchner Du plus Stu’s observations in Cologne:
Ok, so it seems to be attested all over Germany
Hamburger Sie I guess it makes some sense in that awkward period when young people move from being addressed by first name and informal pronoun to last name and formal pronoun, but older people / teachers are used to using the first name; the alternative would be to offer first-name / informal address reciprocally, with which the older people may not be comfortable. But I never encountered it myself in real life. As for the teacher you mention, that rather looks like a pretext; at least in my experience, it’s as likely to have several students with the same first name than with the same last name in a class.
Not in this case; the students were from all over the world…
An awkward period probably existed when the cutoff point was around age 15. In my time, informal address from teachers to students continued all the way to the end of school (one or two teachers asked if they should switch, but we declined), so there was a neat culture shock between school and university, where reciprocal formal address between students and professors was (and probably still is) universal until you reached thesis-writing age.
(Students among themselves reportedly switched from Herr Kollege/Frau Kollegin + Sie to informal in 1968.)