Confederacy of a Dunce

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

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I've had plenty to say in the past about unusual and/or unpleasant pizza toppings, but I'm afraid an even higher standard has been set. Without further ado, let me show you a pizza flyer that recently appeared at Dunce Manor:

Yes, it appears to be an ordinary pizza, topped with pepperoni, green peppers, onions, and GIGANTICALLY HUGE SLICES OF LIME. A very unpleasant combination indeed. Oddly enough, lime does not actually feature in any of the pizzas on offer. So I started wondering why someone might have decided to call their company "Pizza Lime" if lime cannot actually be purchased as a pizza topping.

Googling the phrase "pizza lime" gives very little info, except that "Pizza Lime" is apparently the name given to the monthly discussion forum held by the Trinidad & Tobago Computer Society (originally held at Pizza Hut until the computerers were forced away by price increases). I didn't think that helped all that much, so then I turned to my old friend the OED. Maybe there's a sense of "lime" I'm not aware of.

Starting with the verbs, there are all sorts of senses which could, in principle, be applied to pizza. But most of them less than appealing. There's Lime(verb, 1), 2a: "To smear ... with bird-lime, for the purpose of catching birds", 4: "to foul, defile", and any number of other senses related to CaO. But not really anything you'd want near your pizza (the citrus version a far lesser evil). Or maybe Lime(verb, 3), "to impregnate (a bitch)". Hmmm... a home-delivery pizza might be an aphrodisiac in certain circumstances, but I doubt this is their intent. Or else Lime(verb, 4), "to hang about the streets" (all examples of this term in the OED come from Trinidad, Tobago or Barbados). Pizza you eat while carnally loitering, befouled in bird-lime. Mmmm good. So maybe "lime" is a noun.

I think I've already safely ruled out Lime(noun, 1): CaO and other various noxious substances you really don't want to have on a pizza. Lime(noun, 2) is the citrus fruit (Citrus Medica, var. acida, and some of its relatives), which is the leading contender so far (I've ruled out the sense of lime as a lime-green color since the pictured pizza is not green). Lime(noun, 3) is no better: the tree also known as linden. Maybe the obsolete sense Lime(noun, 4) "Limit, end" (one solitary example in the OED, from ~1420), or the only remaining one, Lime(noun, 5) "colloquial abbreviation of 'limelight'", mainly Australian. This is quite tenuous but is at least a better possibility than carnal befoulment.

Finally I took a wander over to a less exhaustively researched realm of linguistic information, the Urban Dictionary. The very first entry, well.... "A fanfiction or chapter of a fanfiction in which characters graphically fool around, but do not actually have sex.". But most of the rest come back to Trinidad, not just loitering, but in a pleasant sense of hanging out. So maybe it's like a Trini pizza party (in that case, it's too bad they didn't have any Trini pizzas on offer. The Lime Special contains mushroom, fresh garlic, pepperoni, spicy beef and red onion).

Of course one other possibility is that the term "lime" is a last-minute adjustment of some kind. Perhaps the shop was intended to be called "Pizza Time" but had to change its name due to an already-established competitor by that name or something similar. It would be quite easy to change a "Pizza Time" sign into one that says "Pizza Lime".

The one other odd thing about the flyer is that they give no physical address. I'm always very hesitant to order from a place whose location is totally unknown. I prefer to know which grim industrial estate is the source of my dinner.

consume | language

Tuesday, April 03, 2007 4:15:12 PM (GMT Standard Time, UTC+00:00)