On my way home from the Linguistics Association of Great Britain annual meeting last week, this advert on the train (too late, I was already on my way to Kent at this point) offered me a free speciality coffee with purchase of their new 'croiffle'.
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| Advert offering a free coffee if you buy a 'croiffle' |
A croiffle?, you might ask. And what is a croiffle? Using my linguistic skills, honed over the course of the last fifteen years of intensive linguistic training, I intuited that it is a croissant of some kind (see image) with something unspeakable done to it. Obviously this is a blend, or portmanteau, of
croissant and, I assume,
waffle, as it's apparently been toasted in a waffle machine. Why you would do this, I do not know.
But how do you pronounce it? While I and a friend both went with the vowel of
croissant (slightly different for each of us, with his being more similar to the French than mine (/
ɒ/ vs /
ʌ/)), another friend said it as she saw it and used the
oi of, well,
Oi!. And a portmanteau that no one knows how to pronounce is an unsuccessful new word, especially if it's also just a toasted croissant that's a bit bumpy.
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