Internal toppings

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:04 PM -0700 6/19/07, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>Laurence Horn wrote:
>>At 8:40 PM -0700 6/19/07, Benjamin Barrett wrote:
>>
>>>Pizza Hut has a commercial right now for their "P'Zone Pizza"
>>>(http://www.pizzahut.com/Menu.aspx), their version of calzone.
>>>
>>>They advertise it with "toppings", interesting since they are inside the
>>>pizza instead of on top. Innards probably wouldn't be a good substitute
>>>for toppings, but "innings" seems like it would. BB
>>>
>>Why not "fillings", as with calzones proper?  I suppose "toppings",
>>even unmoored from the original topographic reference, preserves its
>>identity as a pizza...
>>
>I wonder if people ask for toppings or fillings when ordering calzone. I
>wonder if any of the chains (Sbarro?) has employees ask "What would you
>like for toppings/fillings?"
>
>BTW, I hear kal zoh neh as well as kal zohn, but the latter seems to be
>clearly winning out in the pronunciation of this dish in Seattle. BB
>
In New Haven, which has had restaurants in Wooster Square ("where
pizza was invented") specializing in calzones since the early 80's,
it's fillings, not toppings.  And it's often bisyllabic (usu. [kael
'tson], with the affricate), but that's at least sometimes because
the final vowel drops in the Campania-based accent prevalent in New
Haven Italian. This is, after all, the land of "abeets", not to
mention "muts-a-rel", "pr at -Zut", etc.

LH

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org