The greengrocers' apostrophe - alive and well and living in Spain

Where does the greengrocers' apostrophe - that curious habit of writing -'s to indicate a plural - go on holiday? To Spain of course, along with the greengrocers. To prove it, here is an example of local packaging:

Spanish has been borrowing from English for years, and there has been a steady trade in the opposite direction, but helping itself to dodgy English grammar is arguably taking the borrowing too far.

One question that occurs to me is why the Bimbo company should choose to call their product a 'roll' in the first place. It does not seem to be recognised by the Real Academia Española as a Spanish word, but no English-speaker (at least, no British English-speaker - I cannot vouch for other varieties) would call what is essentially a flat, flour pancake a 'roll'. A roll is an individually-baked portion of bread or a spirally-wound cake, like a Swiss roll, but it is not a flat disc.

The product in question is for making fajitas, 'a Mexican dish of strips of chicken, beef, etc, served hot, wrapped in flour tortillas' (according to Chambers dictionary, 11th edition), 'fajitas' and 'tortillas' being two examples of Spanish words successfully imported into English. Clearly, once you have put your chicken strips in position and wrapped them up you have a delicious cylindrical-shaped object - hence presumably Bimbo's 'roll' - but the flat tortilla is not a roll, any more than it is a fajita.

This is where the plot - or the tortilla at any rate - thickens. Founded in Mexico in 1945, Bimbo set up a Spanish subsidiary in 1964. (Quite why its founders chose a name that in English is a derogatory term for an attractive but unintelligent woman is an intriguing but not entirely germane mystery, possibly the subject for another post.) The packaging shown above comes from the Spanish company, now a separate business. Spanish Bimbo couldn't call its product 'tortillas' because a tortilla in Spain - a thick omelette made with potato and egg, otherwise known as a Spanish omelette - is very different from a Mexican tortilla .

But then why (question number two) couldn't Bimbo simply announce their product as '6 tortitas de harina' (6 flour pancakes), since this is unquestionably what they are? Presumably because calling a boring tortita a roll makes it sounds more foreign and exotic, even though it doesn't correspond to anything in English. Perhaps you can charge more for a 'roll' than a 'tortita'.

And finally, having decided to sex-up the tortita by calling it a 'roll', who decided the plural of 'roll' should be 'roll's' - and why? The answer to the 'who' bit is presumably a person in Spanish Bimbo's marketing department who knew some English but not very much - a little learning is a dang'rous thing. They had seen the possessive -'s countless times in English and got it muddled up with with the plural ending in -s, as native English-speaking greengrocers are notoriously wont to do. But there is another possibility. The rule in Spanish says that plurals of singular nouns ending in consonants are formed by adding -es: un árbol, dos árboles etc. Applying the rule here would have generated 'rolles', but this would perhaps have deprived the word of its foreign exoticism. Meanwhile calling them 'rolls' would be too confusing for the average Spanish consumer, who is unused to processing three consecutive consonants, or at least these three particular consonants. So the perfect solution is to introduce an apostrophe: this subtly manages to convey to consumers that they are about to buy an exciting foreign product and they are getting more than one of them. Added value in action. (Interestingly, the same packaging refers to 'creps', rather than the Real Academia-approved 'crepes'; this flouts the consonant plus -es rule, but it perhaps makes them look more 'French' - even though in French they are crêpes.)

There is a twist. Lynne Truss in her excellent book Eats, Shoots and Leaves points out that before the nineteenth century it was common practice in English to use an apostrophe to write the plurals of foreign-sounding words ending in vowels (e.g. folio's, banana's, pasta's, ouzo's) as an aid to pronunciation (I am grateful to the Wikipedia article linked to above for reminding me of this). So it could be argued that Bimbo's marketing department is simply reverting to eighteenth century good practice, albeit unwittingly, and we have come full circle.

This, my inaugural post, has already taken me far longer to write than I envisaged and led me down byways I had no intention of exploring. By way of conclusion I would like to put forward a linguistic 'law', immodestly entitled 'Moorhouse's Law', which says that the shockingness of a grammatical or orthographical mistake varies in direct proportion to the permanence and gravity of the medium in which it is written. Thus a spelling error engraved on a tombstone in Westminster Abbey, for example, is much more shocking than the same error written in the sand on a beach with a sharp stick. And the appearance of '6 roll's' on a printed piece of food packaging constitutes a greater sin than its appearance on a hastily-scribbled shopping list. If anyone else has already formulated a similar law and claims it as their own I offer my apologies in advance.