Exes and Os: Will this be the most-discussed topic at the seder table this year?
“Passover is one of my favourite holidays. It’s mandatory to drink at least four cups of wine. Have you tried explaining the exodus after four cups of wine?” — RE:BOOKS.
This week marks the end of Passover. So, I’m sharing a timely piece I adoRE: written by the extremely talented writer and editor Jodi Rudoren editor-in-chief of the online Jewish non-profit publication the Forward.
I’m addicted to her weekly newsletters. Click here to get it delivered to your inbox on Friday afternoons. Oh, I just donated as well! You can too! Click here!
And now, I’ll “Pass it Over” to this week’s REBOOK’s article I AdoRE:D….
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You say matzah, we spell matzo, let’s talk the whole thing out
“Matzo” may seem old-fashioned, but it has a surprising amount of sticking power, and not just to your gut. By Jodi Rudoren, Editor-in-Chief of The Forward.
The size of the blue and red pieces of matzo reflect the gap in search volume over two decades. Graphic by Laura E. Adkins
When our senior copy editor, Beth Harpaz, sent an email a month ago reminding our staff how to spell common Purim and Passover terms, one of our reporters sent up a flare.
“Am I the only one who thinks ‘matzo’ is odd in 2023?” asked Louis Keene, a millennial based in forward-thinking LA. “Why the reversion to Ye Olde Haggado Style?”
Sigh. No, Louis, you are not the only one. ‘Matzo’ is almost objectively odd, an English spelling that does not reflect the way I’ve ever heard anybody pronounce the Hebrew word for unleavened bread.
And yet: As Beth and I muddled through scores of transliteration dilemmas to update the Forward stylebook last year, we discovered that ‘matzo’ has a surprising amount of sticking power, and not just to your gut.
The Associated Press Stylebook, which the Forward follows unless there’s a compelling reason not to, uses ‘matzo,’ as does Merriam-Webster. Ditto The New York Times and Louis’ hometown paper, the Los Angeles Times. But our partners at the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Haaretz prefer matzah, which is part of why our own digital archives are inconsistent. Wikipedia switched to -ah last year, after several rounds of deliberations over two decades.
Since we’re talking about food, we also checked popular recipe sites, which similarly lack consensus: Allrecipes uses matzah, Bon Appetit matzo, Food Network both.
Plus: Google search volume has been larger for matzo than for matzah every year since 2004, and the gap is growing, not shrinking, as shown in the graph below. “The search data don’t lie: ‘matzo’ is more searched than ‘matzah’ by a landslide,” noted our opinion editor and resident data nerd, Laura E. Adkins. That means keeping ‘matzo’ will make Forward Passover stories and recipes easier for people to find.
“I personally prefer matzah,” said Benyamin Cohen, news director and host of our morning briefing, Forwarding the News. “Perhaps more importantly, Google prefers matzo.”
This may seem like small potatoes (potato starch?) given that Israel is on the brink of disaster, our former president is on the brink of indictment, abortion access is in peril, antisemitic propaganda is skyrocketing, the pandemic persists, and, you know, climate change. Fair.
But as I wrote in 2020, when we started capitalizing Black, swapped anti-Semitism for antisemitism and generally favored Haredi over ultra-Orthodox, spelling counts — or, as Abraham Joshua Heschel said, “Words create worlds.” Some argue that matzo with an o is based on the historic Ashkenazi dominance of Jewish discourse in the U.S., and thus exclusionary of Sephardic Jews and others from different backgrounds, so this is not just a quibble over spelling.
The two core principles that guide our stylebook are readability and consistency. We want the broadest possible audience to engage with our journalism without stumbling over unfamiliar words or having to stop to look stuff up. And we want the spelling and other style points to be the same whether you’re reading a news, culture or opinion piece from yesterday or yesteryear. We think of ourselves as a 125-year-old startup, which means evolving with our communities while honoring our past.
“Louis is always the wicked child in these things,” Beth joked. “Every time I send out a thing about style, Louis is always the one who says, ‘That’s wrong!’”
“No, I don’t say ‘That’s wrong!’ I say, ‘Why?’” Louis corrected. Which is always the right question in my book.
So we got into it. We did the research about other publications and public searches. We looked at the history and the etymology across three languages. We crunched the data. And we talked it out.
“As a person who thinks about language a lot, and who cares about language a lot, my personal philosophy is that language is alive and language changes. Ultimately, we want our words to be easily recognizable to readers.” — Beth Harpaz, senior copy editor, the Forward
As I was doing all this research, I noticed that those Manischewitz boxes — and the ones from Streit’s, Yehuda and the newest brand on the market, Trader Joe’s — not only had an ‘o’ but an ‘s.’ As in, matzos. Which exactly nobody ever says in casual conversation (we do refer to Passover as “chag hamatzot” in various prayers, matzot being the Hebrew plural of matzah, but I digress). Because, in English, matzo is both singular and plural. Like fish, which you might just have as a first course at your Seder.
You would not say, “I need three matzos for the Seder plate,” you’d say, “three pieces of matzo.” Right? I ran it by Beth, who worked at the AP for three decades and is my style and grammar compass.
“Put the matzo on the table … she went out and bought some matzo … I’m just trying to make a sentence in my head,” she said, leaning her head back and closing her eyes. “Do we have enough matzo for the Seder? … You’re right, it doesn’t have an ‘s.’”
At least that much is clear. Matzo-vs-matzah, not so much.
I started out the week thinking this column was going to be an explanation of our rationale for using ‘matzo’ in the Forward. As I talked to more people around our newsroom and read up on the debates that have happened elsewhere, I considered changing our official style — matzah seems more readable, more inclusive and more modern, all things we want to be, need to be.
But as Laura put it, search data don’t lie, and we’ve already published a trove
Thanks to Laura E. Adkins, Matthew Litman and Samuel Breslow for contributing.
Questions/feedback: rudoren@forward.com
YOUR TURN: MATZO v. MATZAH
LET US KNOW WHAT YOU THINK
I’ve laid out the history. I’ve shown you the data. I’ve shared our philosophy — and our internal questions. Now we want to know what you think. Click the blue button below to tell us if you think the Forward should keep using the spelling matzo or change it to matzah, and why.
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