Wednesday, March 06, 2019

Elongated grammatical pastries

Two things are always true about Paczki Day in Detroit:

1) The local fishwrap will be at pains to remind you that "paczki" is plural and that you should NEVER EVER use it as a singular
2) It's going to be a footrace of a slugfest of a grand slam dunk of a Hail Mary to see what gets to the finish line first, singular "paczki" or the Elongated Yellow Fruit. And it's close again this year:
 There's another one in the cutline, if you're scoring along at home: "adds butter to a paczki." (Previous paczki whinges here, here and here.)

It's nice, in a way, to observe distinctions like paczek/paczki. I'm almost tempted to call it quaint, except that questions about when foreign words get to retain their own plurals and when we assign them whatever we like can turn into larger social issues before we quite realize it. If you're going to maintain that "paczki" is only and always a plural, though, you might want to assign the same person to read all components of the display with that idea in mind. You could call that person -- I don't know, a copyczker or something.

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2 Comments:

Anonymous raYb said...

I'm not an expert on any of this, but I would treat it the way I treat "beer," of which, we all know, there is no singular.

9:20 AM, March 07, 2019  
Anonymous Q. Pheevr said...

Way I see it, you don’t get to be pedantic about the Polish singular/plural marking unless you also spell it with the ogonek.

10:48 AM, March 07, 2019  

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