A Chicken in Every Pot and a Gaseous Emmission From Every Nun?

In the US, we associate the phrase "a chicken in every pot, and a car in every garage" with Herbert Hoover's presidential campaign. But as I learned in reviewing a copy of Anne Willan's new cookbook, The Country Cooking of France, at least the poulty part of the saying dates back to France's King Henri IV, also known as Henri of Navarre. He wanted to make the transition into ruling as supported as possible. Being a Huguenot, he wasn't too popular on the surface, as the country has been embroiled in the Wars of Religion. So he decided to convert to Catholicism, and he also promised a chicken in every pot. He ascended to the throne in 1589 and nine years later issued the Edict of Nantes, which was probably the first real step toward religious tolerance, at least in that part of Europe, as it secured civil liberties for French Protestants. He was apparently popular among many of the people, although not with the Catholic who assassinated Henri in 1610.

The other humorous lesson in French came from a recipe for cream puff fritters. You fry pits of cream puff pastry and then top them with jam, honey, or sugar. The French name is pets de nonne, and I'll leave it to Anne Willan to explain the significance:

Toddlers learn the name and no polite translation exists. It means quite simply "nun's farts" because the fritters are so light.

I'm still trying to figure out whether it says more about the pastries or the nuns.

French Teen Arrested for Posting Potter Translation

French police arrested a 16-year old from Aix-en-Provence for posting his own translation of the final Harry Potter novel before the release of the official version, scheduled for October. According to the Reuters story, here's what a representative of Gallimard, publisher of the sanctioned French version of the novels, said:

"It is not a young person or a fan we are talking about here -- these are organized networks that use young people," she told Reuters by telephone.

Networks using young people? Oh, right, there are criminal networks recruiting young people to surrepticiously translate large novels from one langauge to another and then to post their work on the web, removing any chance of making money off their effort. The criminal networks, concerned that they seem to be making nothing from their enterprises, are said to be planning to retain consultants to help analyze their business models.

When Is A Billion Not A Billion

In a discussion on a writers' board, there was what I thought would be a brief discussion about what to call 5,400,000,000. Five point four billion, right?

As it turns out, not necessarily. and the explanation is not only fascinating, but it explains something about the BBC - more on that in a moment. First we must return to the 15th and 16th centuries, during which French mathematicians developed the terms billion and trillion - which meant 10¹² and 10¹⁸ respectively.

But for some reason, a century later, some scientists in Italy and France started using billion to mean 10⁹, or a 1 followed by nine zeros. That created what eventually come to be called the long and short scales. In the former system, there was a name every time you added an additional six zeros - or multipled by a million - and in the latter, the new names started with every three additional zeros, or multiplication by a thousand.

The world was now split, with many countries, including Britain using the long form, and some using the short. By the 18th century, the short use appears in the British colonies in North American, although back in England the citizens still used the long scale. By the early 19th century, the U.S. officially converted to the short scale and taught it in schools, as did most people in France. Britain remained unmoved.

By the 20th century, things got really screwy. The French now officially proclaimed the long scale to be the one to use, and by 1994, the Italians also embraced the long scale. Note that these were the very two countries that had started all the confusion in the first place. In 1974, the United Kingdom had official statistics switch to the short scale. I'm sure it had something to do with the French moving back to the long scale. And you thought geopolitics was confusing.

As for the BBC, there is still some use of the long scale, which is why news presenters will still often say "thousand million" rather than billion. How quaint - though I'm not sure which side is.