road pizza
- noun
- Slang
:
cachito de carretera
- Driving down the highway, she swerved to avoid a piece of road pizza in her lane.
Examples
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After the truck's blowout, the shredded tire became just another road pizza on the shoulder.
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The mechanic laughed and said my car was one step away from turning into road pizza.
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Look at that road pizza on the highway!
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The truck driver saw a road pizza after the accident.
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After the truck's blowout, the shredded tire became just another road pizza on the shoulder.
-
Driving down the highway, she swerved to avoid a piece of road pizza in her lane.
-
Look at that road pizza on the highway!
How Damaged
Surface Forms
Morphology
road + pizza
The phrase combines 'road' (location) with 'pizza' as a humorous metaphor: pizza is flat and can evoke something squashed on the road, so a learner who knows both words can plausibly infer it refers to something flattened or destroyed on the roadway. Because the meaning relies on a creative metaphorical mapping rather than a strictly compositional pattern, it is partially predictable but not fully literal or conventional, making it only partly transparent to B1 learners.
Etymology
Road pizza comes from the image of something on the road squashed flat and messy like a spilled pizza. That's why people use it to mean an object that is 'flattened' or 'destroyed' on the road.