Re: Intergermansk - Pizza packaging text :D

Date:    Mon, 31 Jan 2005 19:30:43 -0500

> Pascal A. Kramm wrote:
> > Even though it originated from French, it is by now quite
> > commonly used in English (and german as well, and in many
> > other languages as well), generally referring to "Agraricus Bisporus".
Gary Shannon wrote:
> I can' help but wonder at what point a word is
> considered to be "commonly used."  I am 60 years old,
> born and raised in the USA, reasonably well educated
> (postgraduate degree in comp. sci.) and an avid
> reader. This thread is the FISRT time I have ever
> been exposed to the word "champignon".  [...]
and Ph. D. wrote:
> "quite commonly used in English"?  Not in the United States.
> I just turned fifty years old, and I've never run across this word
> before.
*I* certainly had never heard of it before.  I read voluminously,
and eat out at restaurants many times a week, but I have never
run across it.

and J. Mach Wust wrote:
> Pascal, native German speaker, seems to be the only one to
> assert that it's commonly used in English.
As is his wont, it seems.  A quick Google-search for it shows that,
although attested in English, it is quite rare.  The total number of
hits for "mushroom" is over 3.5 million, that for "button mushroom"
over 300k, but that for "champignon" only 16.5k on English-language
pages.  And that last figure also appears to include sites in English
but by people who are obviously not English speakers, such as one
Brazilian page I found.  It also appears that even among gourmands,
the word is so rare that it's listed in special dictionaries of strange
and unusual culinary words.  All this leads one to believe that it
cannot possibly be in common use in English.

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Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637