Have a close look at this label:
That was part of last Sunday's breakfast. The translation is characterized by some fascinating "delicacy" on the part of not just the person who did the translation but the entire culture for this whom this translation was prepared.
In going from French to English, this translation also went from Catholic culture to a non-Catholic culture.
Before I explain, I should let you in on the joke. The French reads:
Pets de sœurs.The English says:
Nun's pastry.The joke is that the original French doesn't attribute ownership of the pastry to the Nuns; it credits them with the "pets". And "pets' means "farts".
The actual name for these pastries means Nun's farts! That name is pre-modern. They have been called this for a long, long time.
There is some very rough middle class humour at work here. On the one hand, the simple, irony-free, suggestion might be that Nuns are so pure and good that they fart out sugary sweetness. But the very crudeness of reminding us that nuns fart at all makes the ironic intent obvious. Everyone knows that the ironic point of the pastry is to remind us of the earthy truth about how we all share the same digestive tracts. Even nuns.
This is meant to be humbling for everyone and especially for nuns. No matter how good and pure you think you might be, it says, just remember that the same stuff comes out your anus as is the case for everyone else. That's a very Catholic joke.
And think that every pastry shop, on every main square, near every church and cathedral in France sold these things. Every boy or girl going into the shop would see the pastries and know exactly what they were called. We forget this, nowadays, because we like to fantasize that back then people talked in euphemisms and were scared to confront the blunt facts of life directly. It's actually the other way around. We're the ones who live the euphemistic fantasy and are scared to face the realities of life and sex.
And now you don't feel quite so guilty about indulging in a little pastry with your coffee do you?
This reminds me, in the Patristics class I took in grad school, the professor--an Anglican priest--told us that one of the early Church fathers--maybe Iraneaus--believed that the sound of one's farts was indicative of one's relationship to God. The higher the pitch, the better the relationship! While some in the class reacted with horror, for most of us it provided a good laugh! Imagine that being taught from the pulpit in our hyper-sanitized Western culture!
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