The Iranian pizza/elastic snack (pitza/kesh loghmeh) story kept me buzy for a while.
What bothered me was
- the translation of kesh loghmeh, and especially loghmeh. This word doesn't really mean loaf, but something as snack, morsel, mouthful, and is used in a few other names for dishes and sweets (gaz loghmeh, loghmeh kabab, ...);
- the connection made with Ahmadinejad;
- the fact that i couldn't find this message on the IRNA website (maybe this should read "the fact that i didn't search well enough"?);
- the very vague idea that i remember having been told about pizza/elastic snack 3 years ago, when i was in a pizzeria in Tehran.
Neither yahoo nor google are very good / keen (?) at finding search results in Persian, but at last i managed to find a referrence:
The full message can be read here, and when you're there, please have a look at the date: 02-15-2001, 06:16 PM, and that day (and hour), Ahmadinejad wasn't even mayor of Tehran.have you heard the words:
"kesh loghmeh" be jaye Pizza!!!!
"charkh bAl" be jaye helikopter!!!!
"namA bar" be jaye fax!!!
va lots of these funny words!!!!!
I know that all this is nitpicking over a few details, and i know that kesh loghmeh has been proposed by language purifiers in the Islamic Republic of Iran, and i know that Ahmadinijad is a national, regional, international danger,
but i also know that i disgust this kind of half baked lies which are taken over by dozens of news agencies worldwide who apparantly don't check the data.
Makes me think of the idiocies that got published about Russian in the Cold War ("Russian doesn't have a word for peace").
And maybe i'm dramatizing, but if they even can't check this kind of silliness, what about the more serious news?
F