Oh yeah, that’ll work.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has ordered government and cultural bodies to use modified Persian words to replace foreign words that have crept into the language, such as “pizzas” which will now be known as “elastic loaves,” state media reported Saturday.

This is the kind of thing that governments try to do with language all the time, and it never works. They tried to purge all the English words out of French, but people still say ‘le weekend’. They tried to purge all the French words out of English, but we still say ‘remorse’ instead of ‘againbitement’.

It may work in the official print, but people will say what they like. Why is that so hard for authoritarians to grasp? They always want to control the language. Remember ‘freedom fries’?

Of course, one great ultra-nationalist deserves another:

If you can’t say Pizza in Iran then this IS WAR as far as I am concerned!

Witness the birth of the Pizza Rationale. Sadly, it’s not the flimsiest pretext I’ve ever seen. Maybe if Bill Kristol hears about this, he can add it to the pile they’ve been working on for the last 10 years.

Knowing it’s Red State, I am strongly convinced that the author is not joking.