Mind Your Language | 23 August 2003

‘Phwuh, this is a bit scatological,’ said my husband, looking up from last week’s column, his brow glistening with recycled Black Bush. From a man who is seldom ten yards from a sigmoidoscope, that was pretty rich.

But in an interesting development on the great lasagne chase, Dr Peter Emery writes from hot Oman to say his Arabic dictionary gives lawzinaj as a loan-word from the Persian lawzina, ‘sweetmeats resembling qatayif combined with oil of almond’.

Qatayif, Dr Emery explains helpfully, are small triangular doughnuts fried in melted butter and served with honey accompanied by qamar ad-deen (an apricot-based drink) during the evenings of Ramadan in Cairo and other cities of the Arab world. They sound delicious, but not much like lasagne.

The semantic kernel of this Persian excursion is, in Dr Emery’s eyes, lawz, ‘an almond’. A derived word is lawziyy, meaning ‘almond-shaped or rhomboidal’, like a modern baklava. But an almond is not, to me, rhomboidal.