It identifies as pain au raisin
“Lily” Contino – the guy who makes videos of himself in restaurants picking fights with wait staff who fail to tell him what a pretty girl he is – thinks the fact that a large croissant is a croissant=a man is a woman. Yes really: that’s his argument.
Also, he pronounces it wrong. Completely utterly wrong. Just call it a pastry if you can’t manage the French “croiss” sound or even the French “ant” sound.
I will agree that big croissants are croissants; the rest of it doesn’t follow. Does either of these croissants have a penis? Did either of them EVER have a penis? While the rest DO NOT have a penis? Is this big croissant beating up littler croissants for the right to use the same bakeries? No? Then…no comparison.
Both are made of the exact same ingredients; so are men and women. But a croissant is a croissant, while a man is not a woman. There are much more substantive differences than just being larger…try more aggressive, more muscles, larger lung capacity…in fact, just repeat after me. A big croissant is a croissant, but a man is not a woman.
Sure, the big croissant is a croissant. But is the plastic display croissant a croissant?
A lot of words aren’t defined with extreme precision. Suppose that I have one big stick, and I snap it in two. Do I end up with two sticks, or are they just two halves of a stick? What if I put them back together? Do I have a single stick once again?
The answer to all of these questions is: it doesn’t matter. We don’t care. If we did, we’d have defined the word “stick” in such a way that there wouldn’t be any ambiguity. But that’s not what the word “stick” exists for. It’s besides the point.
Mind you, even if we were to suppress that particular issue by being more specific, we could just make up another one. Because of the limitations of human language and humans themselves, most words that refer to physical objects cannot be defined unambiguously. If you try hard enough, you can argue that a piece of toast is a planet. None of the IAU’s criteria for planethood are sufficiently precise that you can’t wedge a piece of toast through, should you be willing to make really vexatious arguments.
But of course, if you decide to classify most anything as a planet, it’s not really useful anymore to have such a word. That’s why picking away at the flaws in meaning isn’t usually a good argumentative strategy: when you discard meaning, you’re not left with much of anything. You also make it really easy for your opponents to reciprocate. By the same reasonings as the ones (presumably) used in this video, you can argue that there is no difference between “Lily” Contino and a complete moron. Yet, for some strange reason, Contino would probably disagree with that. Go figure.
Lots of things are made of the same ingredients as other things. Various pastries are made of the same ingredients, yet we still find some use in distinguishing them from one another. Sparrows and dimetrodons and humans are all made of the same ingredients, yet we don’t allow sparrows to get drivers’ licenses. What’s your point?
I beg to differ! I’d argue that the bigger one is not a croissant, because it doesn’t have the right shape. It’s a bit hard to tell with the angle, but I think the smaller one barely qualifies.
Does that include the one you’re about to eat? If that big cruh-SONT doesn’t affect you in the slightest, surely someone could just come and swipe it away from you, giving you a regular-size cruh-SONT instead, and you wouldn’t care, right?
Nicely done piglet.
I agree with your main point, but is the pronunciation so weird? Isn’t it just the way most Americans pronounce croissant? I was once in a university canteen in Tenerife where the breakfast menu offered croasan. What on earth is a croasan, which doesn’t look much like a Spanish word, I wondered, before realizing that it was a Spanish attempt to represent the pronunciation of croissant.
Yes, it is, pretty much, but I hate it anyway. It grates. I wish we could just call it a crescent, or crescent roll – which I think some purveyors do call it – instead of mangling the French word. Why that word in particular? I suppose it’s because we mangle it in so many ways – the r, the oi, the sant. We can handle “gauche” quite well, but croissant is a car crash.
I don’t know. It seems like croissant is a minor thing, compared to some of the other words that are mangled. Like, Versailles, MO, which is pronounced Ver-say-les. Or Cairo, NE, pronounced like the syrup, Karo. And don’t even get me started on Pap-ill-e-on, NE.
Same with Cairo, Illinois. Also Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, pronounced Cordalayn.
Nevertheless the mangling of croissant is MAJOR.
There’s a road in Hyde Park in London called Rotten Row. Apparently it was supposed to be Route du Roi.