A NY Times interactive story about “the world’s rarest pasta,” by Matt Goulding, is interesting on a number of counts. Of course if one likes pasta it’s great to see it being made in such an elaborate way (“Stretched by hand, a single ball of dough is converted into 256 gossamer strands that are stretched across a drying rack called a fundo in a triangular pattern, to evoke the Holy Trinity”), but it’s the name that’s of Hattic interest: “su filindeu, the threads of God.” Actually, that has to be singular, because according to the Wikipedia article on Sardinian su is the singular article, the plural being sos . The town where the pasta is made is Nuoro (Italian pronunciation [ˈnuːoro] or “less correctly” [ˈnwɔːro]; Sardinian Nùgoro [ˈnuɣɔɾɔ]); the English article gives no etymology, while the Italian one provides some speculation (“Secondo un’altra interpretazione, il toponimo Nùoro deriva dalla radice paleosarda nur , da cui il termine nuraghe”).…