Consider the Lime

First, I feel like I should offer a little bit of background on the impetus for this post, in the form of a snippet from a recent GChat:

4:22 PM Liz: link
4:23 PM me: hahahaha
4:24 PM incidentally,i'm not pleased with the french today, since they seem opposed to the freedom of the press
gawker
4:25 PM Liz: ugh
me: but my main complaint is about the fact that they don't have a real word for "lime"
they call it a green lemon, but it's soooo much more

As you might guess from the tone of that chat, I have this thing about limes. I think that they’re infinitely superior to lemons, and I have nothing against the lemon, believe me. But the lime strikes that perfect balance between sweet and sour, and I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s an ingredient in most of my favorite beverages. There is nothing in the world like a lime, so I’m really annoyed (for a change) that the French have relegated it to second-class fruit status by failing to give it a proper name.

It should be noted that from what I’ve learned in eight years of French class (and twenty-two years with a crazy French family), the French language is less flexible in terms of vocabulary than English. They have a more complicated and developed grammatical system, but they just don’t have as diverse a way of describing things, which is usually something I only notice when dealing with adjectives. It’s also a problem with newer nouns, like e-mail and wi-fi (ee-mell-uh and wee-fee), but that doesn’t bother me. It kind of makes sense, actually, that since these technologies are doing the honorable work of bringing our world closer together, we should all call them the same thing. I think that’s very special.

But they’ve had a couple millennia to work on names for things that have existed as long as people have, including the noble lime. I’ll concede that I might be exaggerating a bit, because I don’t think the lime is a naturally-occurring phenomenon in France, at least not the part that counts (I’m not being an elitist, the dialect of Paris is the one that eventually took over the whole country). But if France isn’t warm enough to grow them, England sure as shit isn’t, either, so that point’s a wash. They came up with specific names for all manner of tropical fruit, like citron (lemon), ananas (pineapple), and orange (I won’t insult your intelligence). I’m really annoyed by the fact that they didn’t bother coming up with anything more original than citron vert (green lemon) when they were naming the lime. It just seems lazy; I understand the mistake if they were just basing the name on appearances. Like red and green apples, lemons and limes certainly share certain external aspects, but once people started eating these things, they should have noticed, “Hey—one of these is kind of nice, especially with iced tea, and the other kicks ass in a variety of cocktails. We should really try to draw more of a distinction between them.” Nobody did, though, and to me that’s just, once again, lazy—especially when you consider the truly ridiculous world they came up with for grapefruit.

Pamplemousse.

I mean…seriously. Send me your suggestions for a new French word for lime (which should be AT LEAST as much fun to say as pamplemousse) and I’ll pass them along to the appropriate authorities.