Tuesday, April 05, 2022

Po-tay-to/po-tah-to, limón/lima

Vacationing in Nicaragua at the moment, we had cause, as you do, to order a slice of lemon. Now, "lemon" in English is a moderately sour, pointed-oval, yellow fruit. "Lime" on the other hand is a smaller, sourer, more rounded fruit, which is demonstrably green in colour. The two are closely-related citrus fruits, originally hybridized in Asia from the same plant, but there is no controversy as to which is which.

Here in Nicaragua, though, the smaller, green fruit is referred to as limón, and the larger, yellow (and much less common) fruit is a lima. That gave me pause, because that's not how I remember it being. A bit of research shows that the lima/limón dichotomy is split almost randomly, depending on the country you find yourself in. 

For example, in Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador and, apparently, Nicaragua, a limon is green and a lima is yellow. However, in Argentina and Puerto Rico, a limón is a lemon and a lima is a lime, which makes more logical sense to me. In Spain, apparently, a lemon is limón and a lime is limón verde (although that's not how I remember it); in the Dominican Republic, on the other hand, limón is a lime and limón amarillo is a lemon. In Venezuela, they just don't seem to know, and call them both limón (which doesn't surprise me at all), as they also do in Cuba (although there the fruit they have available is a kind of hybrid between a lemon and a lime). In Chile, supposedly, there are no limes, only lemons (which surprises me), and so this is a non-issue.

Anyway, unless you are a real foody, do you really care whether you get a lemon or a lime in your drink, or to squeeze on your food?

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