I get the feeling you just want to believe what you believe.
I was clearly talking about widespread usage, as indicated by my saying the term “really only makes a serious appearance in the 1980s.” Obscure, isolated references really don’t mean a whole lot.
But hey, a 30-second search found the term “makrut lime” being used in 1895: The Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review and Oriental and Colonial Record - Google Books. The same search run for “kaffir lime” returns zero results before 1900. Does this prove or disprove anything?
It appears that Makrut and Kaffir lime get a similar number of results from 1800 to 1980 with Makrut having a wider linguistic spread (German, Finnish, Polish plus more). And you are right it really does explode in the eighties - who knew we could blame the 80’s for that.
What is probably needed is Arabic, Sri Lankan and various South East Asian records to map the origin and transfer into European languages.
That’s just the right amount of nightmare to stick in my mind.
hmm introducing me to novel uses of tools may be bad:
So 19th century there are 6 google books results for “Caffre Lime” including a Sinhalese- English Dictionary “sort of rough skinned lime or lemon, sometimes called a Cáffre lime”
Still no idea who these sometimes Caffre lime callers are.
Back to doing weird Google book searches and limitations for other stuff
My grandma used to call Brazil nuts “n----r toes.” She was raised in the South. Eek.
Mine too, also raised in the South. She was casually racist when I was little, even calling my father wet-back, to me. (His response was that no, we arrived to the US on a plane, thankyouverymuch.) The positive thing as that she let a lot of that go in time, as her grandchildren are a pretty diverse bunch, and she wanted to know us all.
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