A bit of Passover lexicography

Your host has written himself into some awkward situations in the past when discussing elements of the Passover holiday, but this year, before it's over, he wants to wade into something Passover-related anyway.

The subject this time mercifully takes place completely in English, so no translation issues are involved. In particular, it revolves around one of the very few Passover foods SC is willing to eat year-round without any hesitation. No, not Joyva Ring Jells -- per the links above, SC does not consider them Passover food anymore (although he plans to eat some after the holiday). In this case, SC speaks of the least prototypical food ever to wear the name of cookie, the tricolor:

(Picture borrowed from Gothamist.com; if they object, SC will take it down.)

A truly prototypical cookie is round, features bits of the filling (if any) interspersed throughout the dough, and is frosted one side at most. The tricolor breaks all of these rules, and is assembled like a layer cake -- if "snack cake" wasn't a coldly corporate phrase suitable only for printing on Twinkie wrappers, it would probably be the right descriptor for tricolors.

Now here's the linguistic hook. Of all the bakeries he's ever tried, SC feels that the best tricolors are made by the Beverlywood Bakery (sorry, no website -- they just started taking credit cards last year), in the Pico-Robertson neighborhood of Los Angeles. SC held this view long before he actually moved to Los Angeles, and it isn't just something that's developed of convenience. However, the Beverlywood Bakery does something that just about no other bakery does in making tricolors -- they add a fourth layer, tinted with brown food coloring.

The hyper-logical Mrs. SC has been all over this one, saying that there are but two reasonable linguistic behaviors for your host to pursue. One is to acknowledge the impossibility of calling the Beverlywood cookies by the tricolor name, and to refer to them as tetracolors. The other would be to adopt the name actually used by the Beverlywood employees, and call them rainbow cookies.

While SC has had to adopt the Beverlywood nomenclature for purposes of orrdering, both of these proposals strike him as unacceptable. Tetracolor is fish food (and yields no hits for the phrase "tetracolor cookies" in Google; ditto for "quadricolor", in case that crossed your mind). As for "rainbow cookies", well...this guy gets it just about right. Rainbow cookies just seem so lacking compared to the mystique of the tricolor (not quite his point, but read the post).

Having said that, we're all about hard linguistic science at Semantic Compositions, and the usage evidence is more than a little in Mrs. SC's favor, as often happens precisely at those moments when your host's neck is most stiff. "Rainbow cookies" stomps all over "tricolor cookies" by a 130:1 margin, dropping to 20:1 if you add the hyphenated version of tricolor. This result holds up even more graphically (pardon the pun) when you use Google's image search; you get just four genuine hits for "tricolor cookies" there, but valid results can still be found for "rainbow cookies" into the fifth page. Against that, your host can only hold up the argument that "rainbow cookie" also pretty clearly refers to a bunch of cookies which bear no relationship at all to the type under discussion (see the aforementioned image search results), and the comment of the author of The Pop View, who indicates that he knows the cookies in an Italian guise as tricolore. OK, there's also an appeal to etymology; one of the commenters in the Gothamist post linked above writes:

i knew the "rainbow" cookie debate would eventually rear its head. my position is that these cookies should only be called "tri-colors" because they are based on the Italian flag- a flag that is often referred as a the italian tri-color.  calling them rainbow cookies is like calling a hamentashen a "triangle" cookie- it doesn't do justice to the history.

But SC can't really hang an argument about what to call a food produced for a specifically Jewish context on what the same thing is called in an Italian context. Can he?

Comments

[The Pop View]

I used to think there was a distinct difference between rainbow cookies and the Italian tricolore. It may be just different names in New York for the same thing. A great tricolor has a strong almond paste taste, a thick (but not too thick) coating of semisweet chocolate on top and the sweet accents of the apricot and raspberry jam. It's moist, yet dense.

[Mrs. SC]

I can buy the etymological argument for calling three-layered versions of these cookies tricolore after their historical origins. However, a four-layered version of the "rainbow cookie" is just that. 4 != 3. Nobody would create a four-cornered jam-filled cookie and call it a "hamentashen" based on historical similarity. Absent three corners, it may be tasty, but it is simply not a hamentashen. Likewise, Beverlywood's rainbow cookies are delicious, but "tricolors" they are not!

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