Bad Bread

Yeasty shenanigans in North Africa

We all know someone whose name sounds like something nasty. Perhaps your neighbor Dick (not to be confused with your dick neighbor) or your friend’s grandma Frances who goes by “Fanny.” But what if the name of your favorite bread sounded like an incredibly vulgar word to your neighbors?

The taboon, a traditional clay oven originally from Palestine where recorded usage dates back to Biblical times. To this day, only Tunisia and Palestine refer to bread made in the oven as khobz taboona, although Tunisian and Palestinian khobz taboona are different — Tunisia’s version is fluffier, Palestine’s flatter. In Tunisia, the word taboona has become an everyday word for bread. You go to the store, you say “I’d like four pieces of hot, fresh taboona please” and you go home with some nice fluffy warm bread and everybody’s happy.

Do the same thing in Morocco or Algeria, and expect a foot up your ass faster than you can say “but—”. Because in Moroccan and Algerian dialects, taboon is an extremely vulgar slang word for “vagina.”

Poor Tunisia. First George Lucas plops some aliens in Tunisia and calls it Star Wars. Now this.

Is that Anakin Skywalker’s home on Tatooine? No, it’s an old granary in Tataouine, Tunisia. 

Alec Guinness goes overboard with the brownface yet again. JK just some stylin’ Tunisian dudes.

How did it come to be this way? Are the two words related? Well, it isn’t exactly something I could ask my former teachers about, so I don’t know for sure. But based on my knowledge of Arabic, they most likely are. Both words come from the same root, which means there’s almost no chance that there’s no semantic connection between them. 

My half-educated guess is that the slang meaning has something to do with the fact that the taboon oven is a hot, round thing with a hole in it, and you stick doughy rounds in it. I do really hope nobody’s vagina ever gets hot enough to cook bread. It could be a fun secret Jedi talent though. George Lucas, take note for Star Wars Episode X: Rise of Breadwalker.

Tunisia’s linguistic misadventures in North Africa don’t stop there. The late Tunisian president Mohammed Ben Caid Essebsi shared his name with the Moroccan slang word for a hashish pipe, sebsi. So an unlucky Tunisian tourist could theoretically walk into a bakery in Morocco and accidentally say, “Glad we got rid of that hash pipe. Anyway, do you have some hot, fresh vagina?”

Yumm, vagina — I mean bread.

But Irene, you protest. Isn’t Arabic just Arabic? How could two dialects of the same language be so wildly different? Well young padawan, a diglossic language is Arabic.

Diglossia means there’s a standardized version of the language that is used in most official contexts, then a grab-bag of wildly different local dialects, many of which aren’t mutually intelligible. A Beijing native who tries to eavesdrop on a Shanghainese conversation may not catch more than a word per sentence. A Yemeni may ask a Moroccan where the bathroom is and be directed instead to the bathhouse.

Diglossia causes a host of educational problems. Do you teach in the standard language, which must be learned but allows speakers more social mobility, or do you teach in dialects, which children already speak? Governments often want the convenience of having a standardized official language, but people are wary of their dialects dying out.

So what’s the solution? I don’t know. Languages and dialects die as new ones are born. It’s the circle of language life. Slang inevitably falls out of fashion. Good words become new bad words and old bad words lose their power. Perhaps in time, new crude words for the female anatomy will become vogue, and taboon will fall out of use. Then, Tunisians may get to buy their bread abroad and eat it too.