bombono

The gift of this band: it is not a small bomb. Look at bombono with an Esperantist's eye and the language seems to be offering you bombo, rank 1,874, plus the fraction suffix -on-, which would make a bombono one part of a bomb. It is a beautiful reading and it is completely wrong. Bombon- is one indivisible root borrowed from French, and the resemblance to bomb- is an accident of spelling that the fraction suffix has nothing to do with. Compare bomboni, which is not a verb, with triono (a third) and kvarono (a quarter), which are what -on- really builds. This is exactly the class of trap the false friends article is about: Esperanto's transparency trains you to cut words up, and then a borrowed root sits there looking cuttable.

What it really is, and it is nicer. French bonbon is bon plus bon: good-good. Seventeenth-century French children said it about sweets, adults found it charming, and the doubled word entered the dictionary. Esperanto already loves that trick natively - plenplena at 2,377 is plena said twice for emphasis, brim-full - so bombono arrives with its reduplication already fossilised. The language could have built the word itself and did not need to.

Against dolĉaĵo. Dolĉaĵo at 2,556 is dolĉa plus -aĵ-: a sweet thing, anything sweet, the whole category from a pudding to a slice of cake to a spoon of honey. Bombono is narrower and more concrete: the individually wrapped, hard or chewy, shop-bought kind, the thing in the twisted paper. Every bombono is a dolĉaĵo and most dolĉaĵoj are not bombonoj. Bombonujo is the box they live in, on the container suffix, and bombonisto is a confectioner.