Mock modesty at the NYT
Two correspondents, Douglas Davidson and Mark Swofford, noticed the
following baffling paragraph in a
New
York Times piece
on Nice and its Provençal cuisine, 6/4/06, by Mark Bittman:
But do not, under any circumstances,
skip the classic niçois version of gnocchi (its name, even in
French, cannot be printed here), made with Swiss chard and served with
one of three sauces: gorgonzola, pistou or tomato.
A name that is so obscene it cannot be printed in the
Times EVEN IN FRENCH?
Ok, you're asking (as Davidson and Swofford were asking): what name?
I sent out an appeal to the full staff at Language Log Plaza, and
within a minute or so quick-draw Ben Zimmer had the answer, obtained
via a Google search on <gnocchi niçois>: Provençal
"merda de can" 'dog shit'. We know from past experience (see
my
recent posting) that the
NYT
is "shit"-averse as well as "fuck"-averse, but this is
ridiculous. Surely Bittman is just toying with us, in an
annoyingly obscure way. (Maybe he's been reading Language Log and
knows that our keen linguist's ears prick up when we come across
allusions to things that can't be printed in the paper. Well, he
SHOULD
be reading Language Log. It's part of a complete liberal
education.)
I smelled a put-on, but before I could do a Google search for French
shit in the
Times -- in my
defense, Thomas Grano and I were busy searching the
New Yorker for "a lot of" and "lots
of" at the time, and we were hot on the trail of some nice numbers --
Mark Liberman did the work for me. Mark reported:
A search on the NYT web site ("since
1981") for "merde" turns up 13 examples, e.g. a piece from 1/20/2003 by
Craig Smith under the title "Villefranche-sur-Saone Journal: When
Bad-Mouthing Wine is a Punishable Offense", which includes the phrase
"vin de merde".
William Safire alone has used "merde" twice in his columns, according
to that search.
It's true that "merda" turns up nothing, but surely that's because
Provençal is massively less frequent than French. And in fact, a
search for "merda" returns the helpful query "Did you intend to search
for merde?" -- along with an even more helpful spot ad from eBay,
asking "Looking for Merda? Find exactly what you want today."
You heard it here: every so often, the
merde hits the fan at the
Times.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at June 7, 2006 06:45 PM