In the everlasting battle between brevity and clarity, this grievous loss for the clarity side, in an Australian grocery skirmish, fought in the aisles of the Preston Market in Melbourne VIC some years back.
From Michael Palmer on Facebook yesterday, this photo of miniature ravioli, made with fresh fillo / filo / phyllo pastry (from Antoniou Fillo Pastry in Moorebank NSW — “specialists in Australia since 1960”), and filled with meat:
[MP, snarkily:] Locally sourced isn’t a problem, but free-range babies are difficult to come by these days
It’s hard not to read the four-word label as advertising ravioli made with fresh baby meat — when the intention was to advertise the ravioli as fresh and baby(-sized) and meat(-filled), or (in my words above) as miniature ravioli, made with fresh fillo pastry, and filled with meat.
Brevity stripped the label down to only four (non-compound) words, and then there was no hope for clarity. You can get it down to four words, but you’ll need more space:
Fresh Baby-Size [or Miniature, or Mini] Meat-Filled Ravioli
The noun baby as a modifier has to go, and there’s not much you can do about the order of the modifiers (since these follow an ordering on the basis of their semantics). But Fresh Mini Meat-Filled Ravioli isn’t much longer.
(MP found other images of this display, from other angles, with a dated version back in 2016 that refers to Preston Market.)
August 16, 2023 at 7:13 am |
I got a little stuck here on the idea of “ravioli” made of fillo pastry. In my lexicon, ravioli are a form of pasta, and pasta dough and fillo pastry are very unlike.