Baked goods part one
This sign for Sally Lunns at Kaitaia Pak'n Save caught the eye of Merv Ellis. We've seen this mistake before but where did Sally Lunn come from? According to Max Cryer's book Who Said That First, in Bath during the late 1700s you could buy a brioche-like cake with a creamy spicy flavour that was sold by a young woman called Solange Luyon — known locally as Sally Lunn. William Dalmer, a local baker, secured the recipe and started making the cakes himself marketing them with a jingle: "Buy my nice Sally Lunn, the very best of Bunn, I think her the sweetest of any ..." The song went viral, 1700s-style, getting a mention in Gilbert and Sullivan's opera The Sorcerer.
Cutting remark gets a laugh
"For years the children have always referred to scallops as frilly dillies," writes Alf Hoyle from Rotorua. "Recently fishing out of the Kaituna with a surgeon friend of mine. We had a few snapper and I suggested we have a drag for frilly dillies. He looked aghast and when I explained what they were, he laughed and said that in medical terms a frilly dilly was a circumcision performed with pinking shears."
Baked goods part two
A reader feels that their supermarket has "committed a most grievous sin with their lamingtons". Reddit user Nothingaddsup writes that they bought "a loverly chocolate one. However, when I bit into it the sponge was chocolate! What the hell is this? Since when has chocolate lamington meant chocolate sponge? Since never that's when! I'm not one to stop forward progress ... but I don't feel it's unreasonable for the sponge to be the standard unless otherwise stated."
French not so smart at simplicity
In an ongoing, if often futile, effort to thwart the insidious creep of foreign words, The Enrichment Commission for the French Language is turning its nose up at the word "smartphone". Instead it would prefer if the French use le mobile multifonction, or 'multifunction cellphone'. According to the Oxford Dictionary blog the commission previously attempted to replace smartphone with ordiphone (from ordinateur, 'computer') and terminal de poche (literally, 'pocket device').
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