Des mots drôles

[muckefuck]

• racahout This stumped not only monshu but also my honkin big Harrap's and perhaps even Steegmuller as well, because he leaves it alone in his translation (yes, I am cheating). I finally found it in the Trésor and was amused to see that the example sentence was the very passage from Bovary where I'd stumbled across it. Only yesterday did I think to look in the Larousse Gastronomique, where it is defined as "a greyish powder, consisting of salep, cocoa, sweet acorns, potato flour, rice flour, sugar and vanilla". Mmm...where do I buy some?
• ondoyer The intransitive sense of "undulate" is apparently unknown in Louisiana and what remains is the transitive meaning "baptize in extremis" (i.e. without all the bells and whistles of a proper church baptism). Two of my siblings were ondoyés and, as I told the Old Man, we may not have been taught CPR in elementary school, but, by Christ, we knew how to perform an emergency baptism if we had to!
• Klöntür Looks like something out of Borges, doesn't it? Actually, this is the German for "Dutch door" and its weirdness can be laid at the foot of the Low Saxons. The first element is the stem of a Plattdeutsch word for "chat", klönen, so the meaning is something like "a door you can chat through". (Cue that classic image we all keep in our heads of Disney's Snow White klöning with the Evil Queen through a Dutch door and accepting her poisoned apple.)

Comments

[lhn.livejournal.com]

Somewhat to my surprise (since I'd never heard of it either), it used to be possible to buy it: racahout was a commercial product in the US in the 19th and early 20th centuries (Baker's Chocolate had a "Racahout des Arabes"-- which they later rebranded as "Cacao des Azteques" for that Franco-Mesoamerican flavor). Recipes (unsurprisingly, somewhat different ones, though the same basic idea of chocolate plus sweetener plus some sort of flour or extender) show up in American cookbooks around the same time, and there are plenty in Google Books if you want to try some of them. (They mostly look pretty simple-- combine ingredients, mix, keep in glass jar-- though some of the ingredients might require a trip to Whole Foods or some such.)

In the US, at least, the idea generally seems to be to make a hot beverage with it, usually with milk. (Though there's a "Racahout des Arabes Gruel" for convalescents that dilutes the milk with hot water and adds salt.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

It really sounds to me like nothing so much as an unnecessarily complicated champurrado.

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

I won't be able to use the word klöning without a mental image of heavy metal cloning. Attäck of the Klöns might have been the best Star Wars parody album Blue Oyster Cult never made. So for me a Klöntür will always be a really annoying gimmick in a high-level DnD dungeon. Even though the Borges idea could give it more class.

I wonder if there's any neat link between ondoyer and ondine? Do both come from Latin root onda? And yet French goes with vag- for wave.