Deep-dish pizza. Adjective noun. “Deep-dish” modifies pizza. You’re saying something is a kind of pizza when you label it “deep-dish pizza”.
For centuries the Romanian people were convinced their language was descended from Slavic languages. To the point where they used the Cyrillic alphabet for a few hundred years. Turns out, not so much. It was all the loanwords that threw people off. But it makes sense given their proximity to Slavic peoples. Romanian is a romance language; it’s descended from Latin. So at times it’s easier to think of it as a hybrid.
Heliocentrism. The humors. Etc. Just because a lot of people think something doesn’t make it true. Just because thinking something makes people warm and fuzzy doesn’t make it true. No matter how much you smile when you say “car” while pointing to a fish…doesn’t make it a car. It’s still a fish and not a car. Just because something is widely accepted for decades (or centuries) does not make it true.
This is also the trouble with trying to have an expert-level discussion about food taxonomy on the internet. Every rando with a connection thinks they get a vote. And that their opinion is just as relevant as other people’s facts. Harlan Ellison has a quote about opinions that comes to mind.
The time I had lunch with Harlan Ellison he seemed like the type of person who would have biting comments ready for just about anything and anyone.
Anyway, it kind of feels like if the pizza vocabulary is actually useful for public discourse on chat boards about pizza that, say, someone who regularly eats pizza, has tried many kinds of pizza in many parts of the country over the decades, who makes it at home from time to time, and who spent a few years shift-managing a pizza place part time, should probably be able to make a reasonable guess as to whether something is pizza or not.
And it really feels like if pizza already exists with NY style and Chicago tavern style having been recognized things for decades as pizza, that someone now making up a formal pizza lexicon that excludes one of those as pizza is a doofus.
Finally, it feels like pizza as an analogy breaks down when everyone thinks it means something different.
