Tort, torte, 'Torteweizen' all please palates

RJ Peltz-Steele CC0 1.0 (no claim to product art)

"Torteweizen"?

Of course I had to try it. The "salted watermelon" creation of Moniker Brewing in Providence, R.I., near where I live, is a self-described "Berliner-Weisse-style" sour wheat (Hopgrail).

The label indicated strawberry flavoring, besides watermelon, with hints of salt and jalapeño. The strawberry flavoring came on stronger to me, hardly watermelon at all, and that was unexpected. But when I became accustomed to it, I liked it.

I don't think sour counts as savory, and the beer conjures torte, not tort, so the beer won't replace this page's banner. Still, it's just the thing to quench the thirst after a hard day at court.

Speaking of torte, "the plum torte" at The New York Times is the paper's "most requested recipe," favored across decades since its first 1983 publication and recently republished as "remixed." I've never made the Times plum torte, but we did just purchase to try the Canadian-made Trader Joe's plum torte ("limited time") before tariffs and seasons take their toll and it disappears into a pumpkin-spice sea.

And speaking of tort, it occurs to me that I have never quite shared here my textbook treatment of that word. From 1 Tortz (2025 ed.) ch. 1(D), pp. 5-6, here is an excerpt:

The origin of the word “tort” is hazy.  It probably comes from the Latin torquere, which meant principally to turn, twist, or wind.  The term was extended metaphorically in Medieval Latin to signify a “distortion” of justice, and then made its way to English via Old French.  The same Latin root gives us the related words torment and torture, signifying the infliction of injury.

The word torte, meaning an egg-rich cake, is unrelated.  Torte comes from Latin torta, for a kind of cake or bread, and yielded similar words in Germanic and Romance languages.  Torte is related to today’s tortilla and, probably, tart.

The adjective for a tort is tortious, meaning wrongful, or constituting a tort.  The word has been in use since Middle English, yet, to the great annoyance of a generation of law students, was excluded from spell-check software for decades and even designated for autocorrection to tortuous.  Tortuous conduct might indeed be tortious, but the words are not interchangeable.

There is no verb to describe the effectuation of a tort.  Informally, we may speak of committing a tort.  Formally, though, we prefer to reserve the term commit for the effectuation of a crime, rather than a civil wrong.  A person who “commits” a tort is a tortfeasor, the suffix -feasor also derived from Latin, facere, to do or make, via the French faire.  While a criminal defendant is found guilty, a tortfeasor is held responsible or liable.  Because a tort is a civil wrong and may result from an accident just as well as intentionality, the concept of guilt is implicated neither legally nor morally, as a general matter.

Cheers.