There is no restaurant in restaurateur

Suzanne Barnhill, Swayback’s Ann Landers of grammar and usage, spotted a caption under a photo accompanying a well-written article on the website of the Buckboard Flats Daily Jolt. It read: “Swayback restauranteur Bob Gypsum helped form the idea of the Sagebrush County Rattlesnake Festival, which will be April 1113 at the Warf at Lake Coyote.”

“‘Restauranteur’ is a common enough error,” said Suzanne, as she sipped coffee with Buck at Mama’n’em’s Cafe in Swayback, “but ‘Warf’ (for “Wharf”) is pretty sad. ... Too bad they (evidently) fired all the copy editors.”

“Restauranteur” is indeed a common mistake in spelling. The word describes someone who operates a restaurant, so it’s natural to write it as “restaurant” with the suffix “eur” tacked on. Charles Harrington Elster, in “The Big Book of Beastly Mispronunciations,” notes that there is “no restaurant in restaurateur.” Both “restaurant” and “restaurateur” come from a French word for “restore.”

The person who wrote the caption was spelling “wharf” phonetically, the way it is usually pronounced. Both American Heritage and Merriam Webster’s dictionaries allow “wharf” to be pronounced either with or without the “h” sound. In Buck’s pronunciation, there is no “war” in “wharf.” It’s pronounced with a definite “h” sound: “Hwarf.” But many English speakers don’t bother to sound the “h.” They pronounce it “warf.”

No matter how you pronounce it, Miss Prunella Pincenez, Buck’s eighth-grade English teacher, would insist that you spell it with an “h.”

“Barny Barnacle is a wacky restaurateur who operates a seafood restaurant on the wharf in San Francisco,” Miss Lulabelle said. “He serves walrus steak and calls it whale meat.”

“I’ve never had walrus,” Floyd said, “but I’m willing to take a whack at it.”