Thank you, thank you, thank you, everyone. (Though I'm going to quote you, Rick, if I get any complaints about the poem! No good deed goes unpunished...) Stay tuned...

I think you can be pretty safe with 'lime', but it might depend just a little on the context (well, obviously). I can only speak for the UK, but while masonry was rendered with plaster as long as I have witnessed it - and probably still is - you'd only have to go back a generation or so to the time when interior walls were rendered with horse hair and lime. I believe it was not as strong as plaster, which is why you had dado rails and high skirting boards and such to stop the furniture from making big holes in it.

Be that as it may, lime was, and therefore can/could be, used in much the same way as plaster.

But it doesn't rhyme as well with alabaster.

http://www.oldhousestore.co.uk/produ...lo_LPLR0010001

er - or you might feel more at home with this one...

http://www.heritageconservation.net/...ir-plaster.htm

Not that it helps, but lime is also a commonly used term for the sort of whitewash that Greeks apply to their houses, sometimes called Asvesti in Greek (asbestos, though not at all the same thing). One limes the walls of a cottage. One limes the trunk of a plane tree. Anybody else familiar with this? I did a hell of a lot of liming when I was young.

"a little, lime-white cottage in the corner of the glen" - Flann O'Brien

So when you limed beneath something, was it sublime?

Sea goers used to use it, did they not? Lime of the ancient mariner?

Okay, okay. I'll stop.