XP: Written Word/English Language&Reading Material

originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Any halfway decent pastry chef (including both me and my wife) can make mille feuilles. It's hardly recondite. It is a dough, not a completed pastry, though, despite the definition Peter found. Napoleon's are made with a mille feuille dough, but are otherwise just cream pastries. I don't know the origin of the cream pastry, but the name Napoleon I do expect originates in France. The name mille feuille certainly does.It means a thousand leaves and refers to the effect that comes with a certain method of kneading the butter into the flour that produces a very flaky pastry with the impression of innumerable thin layers.
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Napoleon was Corsican. (Birth name?) But putting that aside, what’s in a name? Or a recipe for that matter. Just begs the question 😜 as to origin and hence we are back to the Wellerism.

BTW my wife is an outstanding pastry chef. And she makes a mean Sufganiyot for Chanukah as well.
 
I believe his first name was Napoleon. It's his last name that some anti-Napoleonists took to pronouncing Buonaparte, with a pronounced final e. Given these days of breakaway European tribes, which has reached Corsica, as an act of Europeanism, I'm calling that island French. The Wellerism you are looking for is "Corsica is, of course, part of France," as Napoleon used to say in Italian.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
I don't know the origin of the cream pastry, but the name Napoleon I do expect originates in France.
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I believe the definitive ruling on this matter came in Woody Allen's Love and Death where we saw Napoleon haranguing his chefs to perfect the Napoleon before his archenemy perfected the Beef Wellington.

Other references claim that it is a corruption of the Italian pastry name napolitain.
 
The Nuns are a little off topic as to cream-based desserts it seems. But I did do cursory searching online and there is a tangential reference to the cream puff having its origin in 1500s Italy. But there is no indication of a connection to the subject at hand or whether those cream puffs are a form of modern versions, which could use a variety of pastry types. If I only had time to dig into primary and secondary sources (in Italian, French, and Hungarian)....
 
I always loved the Woody Allen scene, but Beef Wellington is a French dish. No self-respecting Englishman would wrap ye olde roast beef of England in a croute.
 
using "socialize" in this manner is popular at my company. "I'll socialize your idea and see what feedback i get and then circle back with your people"
 
originally posted by Jayson Cohen:
The Nuns are a little off topic as to cream-based desserts it seems. But I did do cursory searching online and there is a tangential reference to the cream puff having its origin in 1500s Italy. But there is no indication of a connection to the subject at hand or whether those cream puffs are a form of modern versions, which could use a variety of pastry types. If I only had time to dig into primary and secondary sources (in Italian, French, and Hungarian)....
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Leaving aside "placenta", the layered religious cakes of the Romans -- we would call them desserts but they were probably made for sacrificial purposes, and, yes, that's a hard "c" -- the earliest puff pastry is recorded in a Spanish commercial cookbook published in 1607. Hernandez de Maceras, cook at a university in Salamanca, wrote a small volume on how to prepare food for large numbers of people and he included a dough consisting of greased layers. This is a half century before La Varenne's writings, upon which Careme based his work.

This is clear enough for Western Europe but does not indicate whether it is before or after the Greeks made phyllo or the Moroccans made b'stilla.

There is no doubt, however, that Careme intended the name to be Napolitain.
 
I feel the comma is needed before the "but" in this sentence...

As she fell, she rotated to her right to avoid falling off of the picker, but sustained presumably an injury at that point.
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Surprisingly someone elsewhere says the comma should not be there.

Any thoughts?

. . . . . Pete
 
There is no need for that comma. However, the word "presumably" should be moved to immediately after "but" and set off with commas, thus:

...but, presumably, sustained an injury at that point.

Though, truth be told, I might prefer a construction without the squishy adverb altogether:

...but sustained an injury at that point, I assume.

((And, yes, I double-dog dare you.))
 
originally posted by Peter Creasey:

I feel the comma is needed before the "but" in this sentence...

As she fell, she rotated to her right to avoid falling off of the picker, but sustained presumably an injury at that point.
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Surprisingly someone elsewhere says the comma should not be there.

Any thoughts?

. . . . . Pete
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have you ever thought of taking grammar 101? 99?
 
Because the "but" phrase is not a dependent nor an independent clause but, rather, a conjunction for a second verb, no comma is called for. He can walk but can't chew gum at the same time. Jeff's revision corrects a modifier that seems awkward to him because it is ambiguously placed. Are we presuming she sustained an injury, or are we presuming that what she sustained was in fact an injury.
 
originally posted by Peter Creasey:

I feel the comma is needed before the "but" in this sentence...

As she fell, she rotated to her right to avoid falling off of the picker, but sustained presumably an injury at that point.
Click to expand...

Surprisingly someone elsewhere says the comma should not be there.

Any thoughts?

. . . . . Pete
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Surprised nobody is picking on the hideous "falling off of the picker" when the of is entirely superfluous.
 
originally posted by Peter Creasey:

My feeling was that the sentence works better with a pause, thus the value of the comma being before "but".

. . . . Pete
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Commas do not mark pauses in speech. They set off some grammatical parts of sentences and not others. Using the rule of marking off pauses is a way to misuse them and write ambiguous sentences. Refrain from it. On the other hand, if you do not know what independent clauses, dependent clauses, appositives, and the like are, I suppose you'll have to do the best you may and comfort yourself with the thought that misusing commas is not the worst thing you can do, even if it is not the best.
 
Jonathan, I guess there are differences of opinion on this. A comma is often considered appropriate to indicate a pause, especially a short pause.

. . . . Pete
 
originally posted by Peter Creasey:
Jonathan, I guess there are differences of opinion on this. A comma is often considered appropriate to indicate a pause, especially a short pause.
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Just because a pause is associated with a comma and you would like to pause there does not mean that that is the reason for the comma to be there.
 
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