SPRINGFIELD (CBS) — An iconic New England lunch is getting some big-time recognition. Springfield-based Merriam-Webster announced Wednesday that “fluffernutter” is being added as one of 455 new dictionary words for October 2021.
The dictionary defines fluffernutter as “a sandwich made with peanut butter and marshmallow crème between two slices of white sandwich bread.”
Yes, 'fluffernutter' is now in the dictionary. https://t.co/6fOJZVMXfL pic.twitter.com/s2HFmStMoM
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) October 27, 2021
Eight million pounds of Marshmallow Fluff are made every year at a factory in Lynn. Somerville claims Fluff was first invented in Union Square in 1917. But the first known record of fluffernutter comes from Melrose. You can learn more about the history of the gooey treat in the video below.
Back in 2006, a state senator tried to limit how many times a week school districts could serve students fluffernutter sandwiches at lunch. But the backlash was huge, and the measure failed.
Other new words added to the dictionary this month include air fryer, deplatform, vaccine passport, doorbell camera and dad bod. Click here to see the full list.
An October 2021 dispatch from the word masters behind Merriam-Webster adds a big update of 455 new words and phrases to the dictionary, everything from FTW to dad bod to copypasta. A few new food terms join the list, too, such as the suddenly omnipresent ghost kitchen and an iconic New England sandwich, the fluffernutter, “a sandwich made with peanut butter and marshmallow crème between two slices of white sandwich bread.”
In a proper fluffernutter, the “marshmallow crème” to which Merriam-Webster refers is, of course, Somerville-born Fluff. While the sandwich first appeared in the early 1900s, the term fluffernutter came about in the 1960s, thanks to a marketing campaign by Lynn-based Fluff manufacturer Durkee-Mower.
A Charlestown food hall is raising funds
Foundation Kitchen, a shared culinary workspace based in Somerville, is working toward a probable winter opening for its Charlestown location at the Graphic Lofts apartment building, located right by the Sullivan Square MBTA station. The new space will include a food hall, beer and wine bar, cafe, event space, and production space, with indoor and outdoor seating and plenty of takeout-friendly options. Founders Ciaran Nagle and Tara Novak are currently crowdfunding through Patronicity, looking to raise $20,000 over the next three weeks to purchase a walk-in refrigerator and vented hood for the new location.
A local empanadas-and-more company is also raising funds
Buenas — which has a storefront at Somerville’s Bow Market and a forthcoming “grocerybar” called Super Bien at the Speedway in Brighton — has just launched a $35,000 campaign on NuMarket. The goal is to create the Buenas Aisle, which will exist in real life at Super Bien and virtually for online shopping and shipping, selling Buenas’s existing line of South American products (empanadas, sauces, and more) and a growing collection of new products. Buenas is “like a [consumer packaged goods] company with the soul of a restaurant,” cofounder Melissa Stefanini previously told Eater, and this campaign will help level up the company’s existence in the CPG realm. As with all NuMarket campaigns, contributors actually get back 120% of what they contribute in the form of store credit.
A local cafe is expanding
Decade-old Boston coffee roaster Render Coffee, which has cafes in Boston’s South End and Financial District, will open a third cafe in early 2022, located in the lobby of the Two Drydock development (2 Drydock Ave.) in Boston’s Seaport District, alongside Lord Hobo’s brewery and taproom.
A local bakery is also expanding
Quebrada Baking Company, which operates bakery-cafes in Arlington, Wellesley, and Belmont, will expand to Watertown early this winter, opening a “retro-style neighborhood bakery” for its fourth location. Quebrada has been around since 1977, and this next expansion has been in the works for several years, aimed at providing staff with more opportunities to grow within the company. The new location, a former gas station, will be similar to Quebrada’s Belmont location. Expect cinnamon buns, chocolate croissants, coffee, granola, and lots more.
A “2nd Amendment of food” proposal is on the table in Maine
A proposed “right to food” constitutional amendment in Maine seems straightforward on the surface, ensuring Maine residents the right to “grow, raise, harvest, produce and consume the food of their own choosing.” But opponents think it’s too vague and could lead to safety issues with the food supply.
Got intel that should be on Eater Boston’s radar? Contact the teamhere.
The Rotary Club of Pearlridge (RCOP) is excited to kick-off the 2021-2022 Annual Rotary International Dictionary 5000 Project that will present free dictionaries in October and November to over 600 third grade students and their teachers representing 12 elementary schools in the Aiea and Pearl City school district complexes. The free dictionaries are purchased and donated to the schools each year by the Rotary Club of Pearlridge.
RCOP President Dick Mosko and Public Relations Chair Barry Villamil presented Our Savior Lutheran School in Aiea with their free dictionaries on Thursday, October 21, 2021. OSLS Principal Clarence De Lude, his third grade teacher, and students were excited to receive their brand new dictionaries. Principal De Lude is also a proud member of the RCOP.
RCOP President Mosko, along with board members Ralph Portmore and Barry Villamil will make a visit to Webling Elementary School in Aiea on Thursday, October 28 to delivery and present free dictionaries to 60 students and their teachers.
The RCOP will return at the end of the school year to present one student from each of the 12 elementary schools with a Good Citizen Award which includes a $50.00 check and recognition certificate from the Rotary Club of Pearlridge.
The RCOP Good Citizen Award will be presented to the student who best exemplified the principles of Rotary International’s “Four Way Test” throughout the school year. The RCOP Good Citizen Award winner will be selected by their teachers.
"Four Way Test"
1. Is it the truth;
2. Is it fair to all concerned,
3. Will it bring good will and better friendships,
4. Will it be beneficial to all concerned.
Clockwise from top left: Jane Blunschi, Robin Bruce, Willi Carlisle and Karstin Johnson.
Mid-America Arts Alliance has announced the recipients of the 2021 Artists 360 Awards. Two current graduate students and two alumni of the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing and Translation in the Department of English have been awarded project grants. Their proposed projects focus on poetry, prose and podcasting/media.
Artists 360, a program of Mid-America Arts Alliance, made possible through the support of the Walton Family Foundation, is a three-year pilot program that provides grant funding and professional development opportunities to individual artists of all disciplines in the greater Northwest Arkansas area.
Grants include learning opportunities to develop entrepreneurial skills and build sustainable careers, creating a network of leading regional artists.
M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing and Translation student and alumni recipients of project grants are:
First-year M.F.A. student and poet Robin Bruce will develop Songs for Gordon, a scored audiobook based on her manuscript of poetry and essays, Dear Gordon, using a variety of instrumentation including cello, classical guitar, piano and singing.
Fourth-year M.F.A. student Karstin Johnson, who writes of her work in poetry, "Each poem I write inherently protests the marginalization of the arts. In a patriarchal society that sees women as inferior, resisting patriarchal conventions through writing is revolutionary."
Elizabeth Muscari
Jane Blunschi ('16) will complete work on Stigmata, Specifically, a collection of essays in which the role of queerness and spirituality in the formation of identity is explored, with pieces focused on body image, addiction, sobriety, fertility, marriage and divorce.
Willi Carlisle ('15) will produce A Folksinger's Almanac, a series of podcasts and live performances featuring field recordings, interviews and folksongs from Arkansas and around the world. A Folksinger's Almanac will focus on rural, queer and outsider voices.
In addition to this year's award winners, Artists 360 recognized the outstanding finalists for student grants, including second-year poet Elizabeth Muscari.
Opus by the ninth-century Tamil poet Nammāḻvār, translated into English by Archana Venkatesan, professor, departments of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature
Penguin Random House India (February 2020)
With [this volume] Venkatesan has clearly become the leading English interpreter of early Tamil Vaishnava lyric, and certainly one of the very few truly gifted translators of the language’s premodern riches. — Whitney Cox,associate professor of South Asian languages and civilizations, University of Chicago, writing in The New York Review of Books: “Lovesick for a God,” May 27, 2021
In one of India's most revered ancient bhakti poem, Tiruvāymoḻi, an epic Tamil work from the ninth century, Nammāḻvār sings of his ecstatic devotion to God. Twelve centuries later, this important text sings in English, too, thanks to UC Davis Professor Archana Venkatesan’s translation.
So said the judges who earlier this month named her “monumental” work, Endless Song, as the winner of the 2021 Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize. The $6,000 award is from the American Literary Translators Association.
Professor Venkatesan displays her prize-winning book.
Venkatesan has a dual appointment in the departments of Religious Studies and Comparative Literature, and writes about her work on her website and blog, “Poetry Makes Worlds: On Tamil, Temples and Translations.”
In a post after her win, she wrote: “I am shocked, elated, humbled and honored by this recognition. It took a very long time to birth this book, to find an English to match the soaring heights of Nammāḻvār’s Tamil.”
“A very long time” started in 2007 for a project encompassing 1,102 interlinked verses described by the publisher as “a garland of words where each beginning is also an ending.” A challenge, yes, but a true labor of love for someone like Venkatesan who translates almost every day.
“This is a discipline I maintain,” she said in an interview with Dateline UC Davis for this books blog post. “It’s what keeps me grounded as it infuses beauty and magic into my every day. Usually, I translate a single verse or one short poem. I tinker with it until I feel that click, this intangible sense when the words make sense in English.
“For Endless Song, translating a verse would require reading not just the verse but the commentaries from over the centuries, so it was very slow, painstaking, but joyous work.”
A work of art
Venkatesan described the Tiruvāymoḻi as “wonderful, intoxicating poetry” and added: “My hope is always that more people will discover the wonders of Tamil literature.”
Endless Song, published in February 2020, can certainly help. Whitney Cox, associate professor of South Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago, writing in The New York Review of Books, said Venkatesan’s translation allows readers to take in Nammālvār’s work in its entirety, as she goes beyond the theology to present his poetry as art.
VERSE I.1.5
Each knows what they know,
each finds a different path
Each has their god
each reaches his feet
Each of these gods lacks nothing,
everyone is fated
to find their way to the great lord
who’s always there.
The judges of the American Literary Translators Association said she had “crafted a translation that one can experience not only as a well-annotated, definitive work of scholarship, but also as a living, breathing work of contemporary poetry.”
The Lucien Stryk Asian Translation Prize, named after the American poet who translated Buddhist literature and Zen poetry, and first given in 2009, recognizes the importance of Asian translation for international literature and promotes the translation of Asian works into English.
Endless Song is the first South Asian literary work to win the prize and Venkatesan is the first person of South Asian descent to win it.
The award ceremony took place virtually, Oct. 16. Venkatesan chatted with Anne O. Fisher, vice president of the American Literary Translators Association, then gave a reading.
Poetry is her anchor
Venkatesan officially joined the UC Davis faculty in 2007, the year she started her Tiruvāymoḻi translation, but she did not arrive on campus until 2008, after a research leave on fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Institute of Indian Studies.
VERSE IV.3.8
You’ve entered my breath,
radiant light of wisdom
filling the seven beautiful worlds.
My breath is yours
Your breath is mine
I can’t describe how this is
I can’t describe the way you are.
•••
Read more excerpts.
She served as the religious studies chair from 2015 to 2018, took a one-year sabbatical, then served as chair again from 2019 to 2021. She is also affiliated with the Art History Program and the Graduate Group in Performance Studies. She was a Chancellor’s Fellow from 2014 to 2019.
She came to California from Madras, India, at age 18, studied two years at De Anza community college in Cupertino, then transferred to UC Berkeley where she earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature, and a master’s degree and doctorate in South Asian studies.
“My graduate work took me back to India, a place I knew, but yet had to relearn,” she says on her website. “Poetry remained my anchor through it all. I learned to translate and realized that it was the instrument to understand, perhaps even reconcile, my twin souls — one nurtured in India and another nourished in the U.S.”
She works primarily in early-medieval Tamil, translating from Tamil to English. “I also work with a commentarial language that is a mixture of Tamil and Sanskrit called Manipravala (literally, gems and coral),” she said.
Other works
Besides Endless Song, she has published A Hundred Measures of Time, her translation of Nammāḻvār’s 100-verse Tiruviruttam; and The Secret Garland, her translation of Āṇṭāḷ’s Tiruppāvai and Nācciyār Tirumoḻi, two of the most significant compositions by the ninth-century female poet and mystic Kōtai.
Venkatesan is working now as the director and co-editor ofThe Kampaṉ Projectin which she and six others are translating the 12th-century Rāmāyaṇa from Tamil to English. She is translating Book 5, “Sundara Kāṇḍam” (Loveliness).
She is a member of the editorial board of the project sponsor, the Murty Classical Library of India, an imprint of Harvard University Press.
Another of her projects is “Poetry Makes Worlds,” on the annual Festival of Recitation (Adhyayanotsavam), supported by a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation (2018) and a Fulbright Flex Award (2017-19).
Additionally, she and three other scholars are studying the Nava Tirupati, a network of nine Vishnu temples along the Tamiraparani river. and extolled in Nammāḻvār’s poetry. “Our project,” she says on her website, “is a study of how temple networks are constituted, how these temples dialog with their built environment, and the very important business of making heaven on Earth.”
The UC Davis Books Blog, a project of News and Media Relations, announces newly published books by faculty and staff authors, and awards and events related to books by faculty and staff authors. Contact the books blog by email.
