MDDM23: Croissant

[Terrance]

lorentzen-nicklaus wrote:
> 
> John Bailey schrieb: > What's the 'Bethlehem at Christmastide' remark mean? <
> 
>    it probably means that the croissant was not part of those exquisite gifts
>    which the holy three kings were offering our messianic jesus baby ~ kai

Could be, but with all this talk of rising and risen bread, I suspect it
has more to do with the body of the babe and not the gifts of the
magicians. 

This topic simply won't go away. It's been here since page one. In the
English Church, represented by Mason and his father and not Wicks, so
the lady is mistaken here and RC gives no answer to her question about
sin and butter, one could chose to follow the more Roman Catholic
position, as Mason's father the wise Baker does, or not, as Mason does. 

The words croissant and crescent illustrate double borrowings, each
coming into English from a different form of the same French word. In
Latin the is,  “to grow,” when applied to the moon meant “to wax”; one
could have the phrase, “waxing moon.” Old French croissant, the
equivalent of Latin  “the time during which the moon waxes,” “the
crescent-shaped figure of the moon in its first and last quarters,” and
“a crescent-shaped object.” In Middle English, which adopted croissant
in its Anglo-Norman form cressaunt, the first instance of our English
word, recorded in a document dated 1399-1400, meant “a crescent-shaped
ornament.” Crescent, the Modern English descendant of Middle English
cressaunt, owes its second c to Latin cr¶scere. Croissant is not an
English development but instead a borrowing of the Modern French
descendant of Old French croissant. It is first recorded in English in
1899. French croissant was used to translate German Hörnchen, the name
given by the Viennese to this pastry, which was first baked in 1689 to
commemorate the raising of the siege of Vienna by the Turks, whose
symbol was the crescent.