¿Que What?
The wife is planning to make quesadillas one of these days, and it inspired me to write up a quick etymology of this fascinating word.
Quesadilla (pron. kay-suh-dee-uh) of course comes from the Spanish language. As we all know, “Que” is the Spanish word for “What” when posing a question. “Sadilla”, in turn, is a spelling corruption of the French “cedilla“, which is pronounced the same way. A cedilla is a French bit of punctuation — that little squiggle you sometimes see under the letter “ç”. (Ooooh, alliteration!)
So “Que Sadilla” literally translates as “What French?”, or more meaningfully, “I don’t speak French” — which makes sense, as the speaker clearly speaks Spanish. As for how this strange term came to represent a delicious cheese-stuffed food, well, everyone knows that the French are notorious cheese-eaters, so there you go.
Here endeth the lesson.
March 14th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
one of these days,
Dude. You can never eat too many quesadillas. Well, you probably _can_ but .. man it’s always a good night for quesadillas. Unless it’s a good night for burritos. Or bulgogi.
Mm – being married to an Italian-American raised by a Korean is awesome.
March 14th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
Heh. That reminds me of the joke about the Jewish-Japanese restaurant….
March 17th, 2008 at 10:13 am
I don’t believe I’ve heard that one.
March 17th, 2008 at 12:08 pm
Heh. I’m mean
Didja hear the one about the Jewish Japanese restaurant?
It’s called “Sosumi”
(Thank you, Thank you. I’ll be here all week….)