At the supermarket today, picking up Thanksgiving parts, when I stumbled on this:
My first thought was that it's a pumpkin pie style dessert, that is it didn't really count as a pie because it was no bake.
But then I read it again and realized it was a "Pumpkin Style Pie" and that awoke a sense of dread and suspicion within me, and Lord Peter Wimsey's discourse on advertising words jumped into my mind:
"Which incidentally brings me to the delicate and important distinction between the words 'with' and 'from.' Suppose you are advertising lemonade, or, not to be invidious, we will say perry. If you say 'Our perry is made from fresh-plucked pears only,' then it's got to be made from pears only, or the statement is actionable; if you just say it is made 'from pears,' without the 'only,' the betting is that it is probably made chiefly from pears; but if you say, 'made with pears,' you generally mean that you use a peck a pears to a ton of turnips, and the law cannot touch you -- such are the niceties of our English tongue." (Sayers, Dorothy L., Murder Must Advertise (Harper and Row, New York, 1933) p. 68)
What, then, does it mean when you say "pumpkin style"? It means that, while it may look like pumpkin pie and it may even possibly taste like pumpkin pie, it does not, in fact, contain a single molecule of pumpkin:
