Posted on 08/17/2010 10:20:16 PM PDT by grassboots.org
I, no doubt, stood there with a glazed look in my eyes when my friend informed me that donuts were not originally donut-shaped. I immediately raised doubts about his statement.
“Of course they were donut-shaped” I finally replied. “Let’s say the ancient doughnut was shaped like the symbol for ‘pi’ (π). This shape would have defined what “donut-shaped” meant.” At the beginning, the baker might tell his neighbors he was making pi-shaped pastries called doughnuts. These future customers would have been confused because it would have sounded to them as if he had said “pie-shaped pastry”. Pies have always been pie-shaped, but never pi-shaped, though folks don’t usually mean it when they say something is pie-shaped, either. In preparing this essay, I found on the net an ad for a pie-shaped coffee table. It is nothing of the sort. It is rather “a piece-of-pie”-shaped coffee table.
“Donut-shaped” only carries meaning because we all know what a modern donut is shaped like (as well as the antiquated, day-old donut). Words for things having many different shapes or no distinct shape at all do not usually have the suffix “shaped” added to them. I marvel that so many people use the word “amoeba-shaped”. How helpful is that? As an amoeba can be almost any shape at all, so can amoeba-shaped coffee tables, pizzas or pancakes.
I think my friend meant to say that donuts were not originally inner-tube or life-preserver shaped. According to Noah Webster (1828), a doughnut, in his day, was “a small roundish cake, made of flour, eggs and sugar, moistened with milk and boiled in lard.” See, they were pie-shaped after all.
(Excerpt) Read more at caffeinatedthoughts.com ...
Donuts were dough noughts. Literally “zeros” made of dough.
LOL! I never saw that word equivalency before! If its not the real derivation, it should be - it's perfect.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/object_mar98.html
Everything doughnuts from the Smithsonian
“Donuts were dough noughts. Literally “zeros” made of dough.”
I don’t think that is right. By 1828, as you can read at the Noah Webster link, the doughnut already existed by that name, but no mention is made of a hole.
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