Bouillon, Bullion or Boolean?

Don’t confuse bouillon with bullion–one is a soup ingredient and the other is gold.

Both bouillon and bullion come from Old French, and in fact the same root word, boillon–which refers to the froth on the top of a boiling cauldron. They are pronounced almost the same: Merriam-Webster says that bouillon should be said BOOL-yon, while bullion should be pronounced BULL-yen. But bouillon is a beef broth, like in French cuisine, and bullion refers to bricks of gold, like in Fort Knox.

Thanks to modern technology, we have bouillon cubes: those salty sugar-cube-size morsels that can be dissolved in boiling water for easy soup. But modern technology also gives us Boolean cubes, a graphical visualization of Boolean functions–which are used in the study of cryptography, for example.

If we can assume cubes of bullion make bad soup, I wouldn’t risk the Boolean cubes.

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