Language snob speaks out!

[muckefuck]

(If you read through--or at least skim over--all the pedantry, you will be rewarded with a quiz.)

I'm looking to sign my mother up for a few cooking classes as a birthday gift (for whom? you might well ask...) and I came across one that offers to teach the following recipe:

Pera Còtto Rose con Zabaglione

I know some of you are asking "Why the hell can't they just use good English?" and others are dying a little inside. For me, it's both. My feeling is, if you're going to abuse a foreign language that badly, you should have your right to use anything but English (and maybe play languages like Pig Latin and Esperanto) suspended indefinitely.

How badly? Oh, let me count the ways:

1. The grave accent, when used in Italian at all, only appears on stressed final vowels (e.g. Niccolò). Some dictionaries will put it over stressed antepenultimate vowels as well, but this is strictly a crutch for learners and not part of the written language proper. There is no excuse for putting it over a penultimate vowel, particularly in a two-syllable word.
2. Pera is a feminine noun; if Cotto modifies it, it should agree in gender, i.e. Cotta.
3. Presumably, the recipe requires ones to cook more than one pear. Thus, it should be plural, i.e. Pere Cotte.
4. Why the hell is everything In Caps anyway? This is Italian, not German!
5. I don't know what in the name of all that is lemon-scented that "Rose" is doing there. Are the pears pink? Is the wine a rosé? Are there roses in the dish? Even if the answer to any of these questions is "yes", the syntax is still wrong, wrong, wrong.

I think five errors in the first three words is about enough, don't you? Someone with first-year Spanish could've done a better job than this monolingual clod with nothing more than an English-Italian dictionary. Need I add that no mother of mine is going to take cooking classes there, at least not on my dime!

Now, the promised quiz: In the same mall as this cooking store/school, there stands a branch of the Ohio-based home furnishings store named Arhaus. Does the pun work in your native dialect of English? (If you find yourself saying, "What pun?", then you should answer "No.")

Comments

[grahamwest.livejournal.com]

They need '...eeentur meed loffters treat' as a tagline.

So, yes, it works for me :-)