{"id":169,"date":"2008-05-18T15:37:26","date_gmt":"2008-05-18T20:37:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/2008\/05\/18\/the-linguistics-of-cereal\/"},"modified":"2008-05-18T15:37:26","modified_gmt":"2008-05-18T20:37:26","slug":"the-linguistics-of-cereal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/2008\/05\/18\/the-linguistics-of-cereal\/","title":{"rendered":"The Linguistics of Cereal"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Taking a break from my Air Traffic Control duties for a moment, I was munching away on some breakfast cereal yesterday.  I had let my eyes wander to the side of the cereal box on the table in front of me, and I had drifted into that eyes<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/10174550@N05\/2503302868\/\" title=\"honeynut by warwalker_2000, on Flickr\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm3.static.flickr.com\/2258\/2503302868_3d0975459e.jpg\" alt=\"honeynut\" align=\"right\" height=\"500\" width=\"333\" \/><\/a> glazed over, staring into the half-distance kind of reverie that characterizes so much of my best cogitation.  As such, I suppose I sub-consciously knew that something of a revelation was likely to be shortly forthcoming.  And behold:<\/p>\n<p>In Canada, the country from which (owing to certain geographic peculiarities) most Juniorvanian staples are imported, there are laws that require all packaging &#8211; like, say a cereal box &#8211; to be bilingual.  What my eyes were staring at, but not really seeing, was this:   &#8220;Honey Nut Cheerios&#8221; are known in French as &#8220;Cheerios aux miel et au noix&#8221;.  Something about that struck me as odd, and I began to mull more aggressively.  &#8220;Cheerios aux miel et au noix&#8221; seemed like a rather clunky handle, one that was an obvious transliteration, stinking rather obviously of the work of a regulatory compliance lawyer.  It doesn&#8217;t have the lyrical beauty one would expect had it been dreamed up by a marketing executive; far from rolling off the tongue, it kind of spills onto the floor like so much fumbled flatware, clattering noxiously in an otherwise perfect silence.<\/p>\n<p>In that moment, I saw one simple truth.  If I were French, rather than having to flex and contort my mouth around  &#8220;Cheerios aux miel et aux noix&#8221;, I would say fuck it and go with Chex instead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Taking a break from my Air Traffic Control duties for a moment, I was munching away on some breakfast cereal yesterday. I had let my eyes wander to the side of the cereal box on the table in front of me, and I had drifted into that eyes glazed over, staring into the half-distance kind [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[124,42,3],"tags":[270,271,269,1189,272],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/heroesinrehab.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}