Thursday, 25 February 2010

Circumventing the ready meal

(A bit like Romancing the Stone, but less... er... romantic)

The wilds of Crawley appear fairly free of dastardly lexical deeds today. However, this one did raise a chuckle:
[Company] redesigned the packaging so that all the information was on a watch strap-shaped strip of cardboard circumventing the meal.
Alarm bells ring... rightly so, it transpires. The OED says:
Circumvent:
find a way around [an obstacle], overcome (a problem or difficulty) typically in a clever and surreptitious way: terrorists found the airport checks easy to circumvent.
Sneaky little cardboard strip!

The Guardian has a Word of Mouth blog post on foodie mispronunciations today, with such beauties as crudités pronounced "crudd-ites" and mange tout as "mango trout".

My favourite response so far comes from Pippatree:
Not a mispronunciation, but a mistranslation. As a student in a French conversation class, we were discussing food; fast food and ready meals in particular. I made the point that I thought there are too many preservatives in ready-prepared meals. Unfortunately and embarrassingly, 'preservative' in French is conservateur and not, as I assumed, préservatif, although too many condoms in ready meals would also be an issue for me.

4 comments:

  1. This talk of mispronunciation reminds me of the presenter on 70s children's TV show Tiswas who, while talking about motor racing, referred to a 'grand pricks' competition.

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  2. This made me chuckle out loud. I instantly had a picture of a watchstrap shaped piece of cardboard tiptoeing cautiously around a ready meal, which may or may not have been ready for such tactics.
    As for preservatifs dans les ready meals - guffaw!!!
    I had been writing, for several months, in the diaries of my learned 'guvs' at work 'ex partie' and hadn't noticed the bemused looks on their faces until one of them finally put me right and pointed out, in a hushed tone, that it should, in fact, be 'ex parte'. I am careful not to make that mistake again!

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  3. "[Company] redesigned the packaging so that all the information was on a watch strap-shaped strip of cardboard circumventing the meal."

    The implication being that prior to the invention of this innovative cardboard strip the information was contained within the meal?

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  4. Haha, no, that was this evil sub only quoting part of the paragraph! It was previously on a cardboard sleeve (not watch strap-shaped at all), don't you know.

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Why did I turn out such a pedant? Well you'd have to ask my TV-banning, lentil-baking, library-enforcing, doctor-eschewing, beanbag-sitting, grammar-correcting, homeopathic, 2nd dan black belt, all-round no-nonsense mother. 'Cos me, I got no idea.