Naive homemade mole

[bluesleeper]

Not wanting to bust open a jar of Trader Joe's mole (MOH-lay, the culinary item) for a meal just for myself, and having time to kill while waiting for the beans to finish, I made one myself, by looking at the ingredients in the Trader Joe's mole and just omitting things I didn't have. Mine was made with oil, balsamic vinegar, tahini, sugar, cocoa

Comments

[sir_graeme]

Pronunciation be damned, Mole should be the title of the sequel to Ratatouille.

[aulic_exclusiva]

The Diccionario de la Lengua Española, Vigésimo-segunda edición, says that mole comes from Nahuatl mulli, a sauce.

Perhaps it would make more sense to use the Nahua original in English?

[bluesleeper]

It would if there were not already a standard English usage. Lots of people know what you're talking about when you write (or especially, say) "mole", but as soon as you say or write "mulli", you'd have to say that you mean "mole" and for some reason have chosen to use a incomprehensible-to-almost-everyone word when there's already a perfectly good, semi-nativized word.

*sticks out tongue*

[aulic_exclusiva]

You may be right in your own BRATTY way.

It is unfortunate, though, that a word that has alternative meanings in BOTH English and Spanish has become, at least to the American middle class, standard.

[bluesleeper]

The brattiness was, I assure you, just part of the banter.

While mole describes several (dissimilar) sauces in Spanish, evidently only what is called by Mexicans (and, I'd guess but do not know, other Spanish speakers) mole poblano is well known enough among English-speakers to fall under the designation mole--the other sauces simply aren't talked about so there's no need for a word to describe them, or for them to also fall under the designation mole in English.

Compare the French word, smoking. The word means several things other than smoking jacket in English (which it by itself doesn't even mean), but evidently the word as borrowed into French gained currency only for the article of clothing, most likely because French had no need for borrowing the other uses of the word as it already had perfectly robust words for tobacco use and all the other meanings of smoking.

Moreover, even if the word should (by whatever standard) be mulli in English, people use language to communicate, and communication is ill-served by using words