Today’s episode brought to you by Grammar Girl’s new book. Look for the link at grammar.quickanddirtytips.com

In 1995 Douglas Coupland wrote a book called Microserfs.

Douglas Coupland had made his name in 1991 with his book Generation X and many people—including me until just now—were under the impression that Coupland coined the term Generation X for young adults with an uncertain future.

People born after the peak of the baby-boom are often called Gen-X-ers with the thought in mind that early baby-boomers scooped up all the executive positions in a growing economy and Gen-X-ers have to wait until those people ten and twenty years older than they are, die off, before they can get the good jobs.  By which time of course it’ll be too late because the technology will have all changed and only the people twenty years younger will know how to use it.

But I digress, and since I started off on a digression that makes this a nested digression and I better return to my original digression.

Even the Oxford English Dictionary mentions Douglas Coupland in its entry for Generation X. But they mention him as the popularizer of the term, not as the inventor.

The inventor is unknown, but the first citation goes back to 1952 appearing in Holiday magazine and so pretty much predates the birth of the people we now think of as belonging to Generation X.

The meaning was pretty much the same back those fifty odd years ago too which goes to show that maybe all generations of young adults appear to have uncertain futures.

I started off saying that Douglas Coupland wrote another book and in that book Microserfs he may have coined the term flat food.

In his book a software designer is holed up in his office and his friends buy him flat food so they can be sure he is actually eating by slipping it under his office door as he is fretting for days over writing his code.

There are plenty of references to flat food on the internet and in popular culture but the term hasn’t been around long enough that it’s made it into any of the respectable dictionaries so I can’t be sure it was Douglas Coupland that coined it.

But of course among Gen-X-ers and everyone else the leading flat food is pizza.

According to Pizza Magazine—yes Virginia there is a Pizza Magazine—in their 2007 Pizza Power Report they say that in a year people in the United States spend more than $32 billion on pizza.

According to John Ayto pizza as a word used to be so unfamiliar to English speakers that they felt it necessary to add a descriptor calling it pizza pie.

This only emphasizes the long lead up time sometimes needed for words to become widely used.  English readers were first exposed to the word pizza in a dictionary back while William Shakespeare was in his heyday.  But this was an Italian-English dictionary so we can’t call it an English word yet.

In 1825 Baroness Frances Bunsen wrote of pizza.  She was an English gal who married a German nobleman who just happened to be a diplomat and so she spent a lot of time in Italy.  Since in Italy pizza meant not only cheesy food as we might imagine, but also fruity desert food too, we don’t actually know if Baroness Bunsen was actually talking about the pizza we know and love.

The citation from 1878 is pretty decisive though since it gives a recipe:

Anoint [dough] profusely with oil of olive, and dab in pieces of garlic, anchovy, strong cheese, rancid bacon, and whatsoever else may be highest in flavour and lowest in price; put into a hot oven, bake, and thou hast pizza.

The reason Italians have been calling flat food pizza for centuries is a bit of a mystery.

The OED heaps scorn on the idea that it might have come from a Greek word placous meaning flat. Instead they prefer the theory that some Germans brought it to Italian when they arrived in Lombardy about 1500 years ago.

The reason Lombardy is called Lombardy is because the German’s who took over the place had “long beards.”

Anyway they had a word bizzo meaning a “bite,” a “morsel” or a “cake made of flour.”  So the OED gives this word root some credit, even though they won’t swear by it.

Merriam-Webster offers another theory; that pizza is related to the modern Greek word pitta meaning “flatbread.”

This in turn is thought to be related to the roots of the word pitch which is supposed to relate because it in turn means “fat” and you’d cook your flatbread in a little fat.

The OED and John Ayto both take pitta in different directions though.

Before I go I just wanted to tell Virginia that not only is there a Pizza Magazine but if she wants she can tune into pizzaTV.com or pizzaRadio.com where she can subscribe to a podcast and receive episodes of This Week in Pizza.

Can you believe it?  A podcast on pizza; what’s next, a podcast on etymology; on grammar?

That’s a neat segue to let you know that Grammar Girl’s book has made the New York Times Best Seller List.  Congratulations Grammar Girl!