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Nicolas Sarkozy and the problem with 'sweet treat'
['Dot Wordsworth', 'Dimitri Burshtein', 'The Spectator Australia', 'Tom Switzer', 'Judith Sloan', 'Jacob Heilbrunn', 'Laurie Wastell']
The Spectator Australia
In October, Nicolas Sarkozy took with him to prison a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo.
I have an aversion to the jangling phrase sweet treat.
Sweet treat has not yet found its own place in the OED, although the phrase is used there in the definition of the chiefly Australian or New Zealand word crackle, which, since 1937, has meant ‘a sweet treat made by combining a crunchy breakfast cereal with chocolate’.
The nub of the word treat was originally its gratuitousness.
Hence the three non-U indicators in half a line of John Betjeman’s poem ‘How to Get on in Society’: ‘Is trifle sufficient for sweet?’ How Betjeman would have loved putting sweet treat on the lips of the tin-eared.