Jeff Stier, a lawyer and senior fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research who would oppose any lawsuit against Nabisco, agreed nevertheless to play devil's advocate for me and explain in legal terms how a plaintiff might justify suing Oreos. "I'm not sure a class action on this would be a whole lot sillier than the actual class actions that have been filed claiming that the Subway 'footlong' sandwich was only 11 inches," says Walter Olson of the Cato Institute and the great legal blog Overlawyered-whose readers also fear a lawsuit-in an email to me. "The case is about holding companies to deliver what they've promised," said New Jersey attorney Stephen DeNittis, who filed the first lawsuit against Subway, in remarks I suspect would sound dramatically similar to comments an attorney might make in announcing a lawsuit against Oreos. That places Double Stuf Oreos in the same range as the Subway sub that's the subject of a lawsuit because it's "between 5 and 8.3 percent short" of a foot long. That means the creme in a Double Stuf Oreo is 7 percent lighter than two times the creme in a regular Oreo. That may seem like hairsplitting-especially given the fact that dictionaries define the word "footlong" not as "exactly 12.00 inches" but, rather, as "approximately one foot in length."īut consider that Anderson's students determined that the filling in a Double Stuf Oreo weighs only 1.86 times more than does the filling in a regular Oreo. The plaintiffs allege, in fact, that Subway subs "are anywhere between 5 and 8.3 percent short." In those cases, now consolidated in federal court, several plaintiffs sued Subway over claims the chain's "footlong" sub is not a full 12 inches long. The prospects of an Oreo lawsuit might have appeared slim were it not for a series of lawsuits that were launched just this year against the sandwich chain Subway. But Anderson is not a class action attorney. To Anderson's credit, he appears to be little more than surprised by the findings. But it piques my interest because, as a food lawyer who's very often not a fan of lawsuits targeting food companies, I fear the next step might be litigation. The story does indeed make for some light summer reading. Even the gossip website TMZ got in on the action. In a particularly slow news week in the slowest news month, ABC News and other outlets came calling. The students determined that the creme in the Double Stuf Oreos they tested weighed less than twice as much as the creme in regular Oreos they tested. The scandalous headline, courtesy The Huffington Post, is the result of the efforts of Dan Anderson, a high school math teacher in upstate New York who had his students weigh three types of Oreo cookies and report their findings. If this reminded you of yet another instance of life riffing on The Onion or Ron Swanson, you're not alone. Related: Stopped stopping.Earlier this week a mini food scandal erupted under the following headline: "Double Stuf Oreos Don't Actually Have Double The Creme." Stop-motion is from 1851, originally of looms. Stop-light is from 1922 stop-sign is from 1918. Meaning "make a halt or stay, tarry" is from 1711. Sense of "bring or come to a halt, discontinue" (mid-15c.) is from notion of preventing a flow by blocking a hole, and the word's development in this sense is unique to English, though it since has been widely adopted in other languages perhaps influenced by Latin stupere "be stunned, be stupefied." Intransitive meaning "check oneself" is from 1680s. Century Dictionary says this "suits phonetically," but "is on grounds of meaning somewhat doubtful." Barnhart, for one, proposes the whole Germanic group might be native, from a base *stoppon. These words are said by many sources to be a Germanic borrowing of Vulgar Latin *stuppare "to stop or stuff with tow or oakum" (source of Italian stoppare, French étouper "to stop with tow"), from Latin stuppa "coarse part of flax, tow." In support of this theory, it is said that plugs made of tow were used from ancient times in Rhine valley. Old English -stoppian (in forstoppian "to stop up, stifle"), a general West Germanic word, cognate with Old Saxon stuppon, West Frisian stopje, Middle Low German stoppen, Old High German stopfon, German stopfen "to plug, stop up," Old Low Frankish (be)stuppon "to stop (the ears)."
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