word choice - How to rephrase "cream flavoured cream"?


I saw this on my wafers the other day: "Wafers with cream flavoured cream". This sounds horribly recursive to my ear. How can you rephrase it or use a synonym without losing the original meaning?



Answer



Makers of mass-produced dessert snacks in the United States struggled with this problem for years, a problem exacerbated in their case by the fact that the "cream-flavored cream" filling might in fact contain no cream. Their solution was to popularize terms such as "creme" and "creme-filled"—without the grave accent over the first e—and the even more heavily processed-sounding "kreme" and "kreme-filled." Dunkin' Donuts, for example, currently offers a Vanilla Kreme Filled Donut and a Boston Kreme Donut whose debt to any living cow (or kow) is unknown to me. A marketer might confidently claim that a wafer contained "cream-flavoured creme," without having to go into detail (on the front of the package, anyway) about what industrial substances made up the creme.


If you wanted to stay away from creme and kreme, the simplest way to avoid the repetition of cream in your example would be to replace the second cream with filling: "Wafers with cream-flavoured filling." In the context of a mass-produced sweet treat, U.S. readers would immediately interpret "filling" to mean "squishy or pasty (and very sugary) partially hydrogenated goo." But I don't know whether filling carries the same instantly recognizable sense outside the U.S. that it does here.


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