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What's the most petty/pointless/pedantic hill you're willing to die on?
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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2024
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The "is a hot dog a sandwich" and similar discussions are solved with the mighty sword of language and not some rigid taxonomy about fillings and bread.
Imagine a set of food items on a table, hot dog amongst them, but not other pseudo-sandwiches. I ask you to "Please pass me that sandwich." If there is but a moment's pause in your mind before you reach for the hot dog, even if it's as you surmise I must be speaking about the hot dog as there are no other sandwich-like items available, then it is not a sandwich.
Psycholinguisitics understands this effect. The "wrong" word is increasing cognitive load and slowing down the listener's comprehension. The exact same thing happens when pronoun use is unclear and a person has to parse the most likely referent from context.
Language, especially English, is not computer code but leveraging the existing "libraries" of meaning and declaring variables carefully is usually very useful.
I wish we had a dialect or subset of English that was intended to be more like computer code, and would be used for precisely specifying things. I have no idea how we'd do such a thing, and it'd never be adopted (and probably it's been tried!). But trying to write English in a way that can't be misinterpreted can be a real chore.
This does exist in professional disciplines as jargon. I work in Orthopaedics and we do not say the “over here, inside part of my knee in the front. “. We say, “inferior, medial pole of the patella”
That's true and a great example of what my industry needs.
To make an analogy, in the software industry we call 7 different knee-like things "knees". Not to be confused with the product, Knee, which is also knee-like, but due to its name either pollutes the search results for other knees OR can literally not be searched, and is only a very specific case of knee anyway!
Relevant XKCD
We do have that; it's called "legalese."
On a tenuously-related note, I really wish politicians would use Git (or at least some form of real version control) instead of relying on redlined drafts in Word.
I completely agree that Git has some great use cases outside software, and I like the one you suggested. If git is a bidet, random untracked edits (by anyone with access!) to documents are the TP we should have left behind as a society by now.
git is the bidet of information.
Natural human languages always have ambiguity. There are plenty of conlangs (constructed languages) specifically designed to avoid ambiguity though if you wanted to use one of those.
If such a version of English were ever made, it would immediately gain ambiguity as soon as people began speaking it fluently (and same for the conlang if a community of speakers began using it fluently as well).
Yeah that's fair, and it was clear to me from the jump that it's an unrealistic desire.
I think "legalese" might be close to what you're describing. It can still be ambiguous, but it seems to be our best attempt at avoiding that. Some forms of technical writing may also meet your definition.
I do plenty of technical writing just documenting software I write, and that's definitely what has me pining for something a little more prescriptive. Even just reordering some words can suggest different meanings and it's very difficult to step outside my own understanding of what I'm writing about to see it with "fresh eyes", how someone else may interpret it.
I have to acknowledge that legalese does meet the criteria! Someone else mentioned that too. It feels very far off from what I had in mind though. Maybe just because I don't speak it fluently!
I use this example to introduce formal and functional approaches to topics in the social sciences. Any argument you try to make within the debate ends up including a variant of “…because sandwiches [abstraction about what formally defines a sandwich]”, which itself presumes that the “right” way to carve up the world is in categories of form. You could also conceive of sandwiches functionally, where something isn’t a sandwich if we (some cultural or linguistic group) just don’t think of them that way.
From a functional view, the very fact the debate exists at all means hot dogs aren’t sandwiches, cereal isn’t soup, pop tarts aren’t ravioli, etc.
Then I make them think about it in contexts like language, Durkheim, and policy making and watch their little minds explode.
My reasoning is that a hotdog is a sausage. When you say you want a sandwich, you don't say "pass me a ham" you say "pass me a ham sandwich." When ordering a named sandwich, "I'll have a Ruben" it's widely understood that a Ruben is a sandwich so the modifier is already packaged in the name. A sandwich has "Sandwich" as a defining modifier.
When you ask for a hotdog you don't say, "give me a hotdog sandwich" you say, "give me a hotdog." The same situation works with bratwurst, you don't order a brat sandwich. To further reinforce this, if you're in the south and central US and order a Hotlink it comes on it's own or in a hotdog bun but if you order a "hotlink sandwich" you get two hotlinks cut length wise and placed on a hamburger bun or bread.
A sausage can have a bun as a condiment and still be just a sausage. A sandwich can have sausage, but is still refered to as a sandwich. So a hotdog is a sausage served with bread, not a sandwich.
Are pepperoni and salami sausages?
It doesn't change your sandwich example since they still fit if they are sausages, but sausage is another example of a name that is consistent except for all the times it isn't.
Yes.
It does unless you're putting an entire pepperoni or salami in one piece on your bread and still call it a sandwich. I would call bread with a number of thin hotdog-slices still a sandwich, too.
Nobody calls papperoni sausage when it is on pizza though. That is consistent with your example that a sausage is generally called a sausage only if it has not been sliced.
Except for summer sausage.
Honestly the biggest takeway from the whole discussion is that what we call food is completely arbitrary and just people going along with what the most vocal people are saying. Which is true about any informal communication.
Maybe this is a language thing, but on Dutch we very much call slices sausage “sausage” (well “worst” but that means “sausage” in Dutch). So I'm used to salami on pizza being gesneden worst / sliced sausage.
Uh
Hot dog is obviously a taco
If you go to France and order a taco, you're in for an unpleasant surprise.
Those abominations are not tacos and as a native Texan that's my hill to die on.
I suppose you feel the same way on the "soup is cereal" too?
I've usually heard that framed the other way around, but, yes, that sort of argument is also easily solved by this test.
I'll recklessly posit that most "is x a y?" arguments can be addressed with this methodology, noting the exception of the fruit and vegetable ones, since the answer is simply a little more complicated, e.g. a tomato is botanically a fruit and culinarily a vegetable. The word fruit and vegetables have similar but functionally different meanings in botany and cuisine terminology, which explains the distinction.
I'd like to argue the fruit/vegetables dilemma is just arbitrary nonsense. All fruits come from vegetation, they're as much vegetable as the stim, leaves, or flowers. The only reason we separate them is because some idiot got too carried away with taxonamy.
The correct definition of vegetable is "a part of a plant that kids won't eat"
I'm far more involved with the culinary school of thought than the botanical one, so I think the distinction is far more functional there.
Vegetables cook differently and largely taste differently than fruits. You can swap most fruits for one another in a recipe and swap most vegetables for one another, but swapping fruit for a vegetable can change it drastically.
Noted exceptions, "vegetable" seems to include both fleshy vegetables such as potatoes and zucchini but also leafy greens, which aren't so easily swapped in recipes. Also, tomatoes can sometimes be swapped for fruits with surprising results, even in traditionally savory dishes.
And "almond milk is almond juice"
There’s no such thing as almond milk. You know how I know ? Because there’s no almond tiddies.
With apologies to Lewis Black.
I use a similar example.
If I went to a restaurant and ordered a 3 meat sandwich, and they gave me a hotdog, I'd be fucking pissed. Likewise if I ordered a hotdog and they gave me a taco with solidified beef and relish, I'd be confused, and concerned that I got somebody else's weird special taco order.
Categories aren't limited only to the forms and functions, but expectations. You can redefine or consolidate terms all you like but all you're doing is causing confusion. If that's what people are after then good troll I guess.
If you think of sandwich as a verb, then any food that is "sandwiched" can be a sandwich. Hamburgers, hoagies, hotdogs, tacos, quesadillas, etc. However, by convention, when there is a more common, dedicated word for foodstuff you should use that instead. Tacos are sandwiches but it is weird to call them that when we can just call them tacos.
Umm acktually a tomato is a fruit and strawberries aren’t berries. 🤓
But if, instead of a hot dog, there are sliced deli meats on the table and you ask me to pass the sandwich, I'm still going to pause and be confused because component parts are never the final product. I'm not sure what this proves.
I have a different issue.
A hot dog is a Frankfurt sausage or frankfurter in the United States. Frankfurters were notorious in the sausage scene for having the Frankfurt bend. You've probably seen this bend on fancier sausages like Louisiana Hot Links, or Chicken Pineapple. But US hot dogs, whether Ball Park or Oscar Meyer or whatever are these straight things.
Hot dogs are no longer hot dogs.
https://www.history.com/news/sandwich-inventor-john-montagu-earl-of-sandwich
An article from the ancient aliens people who run "The Secret Nazi Laser Weapons of the Luftwaffe" so boomers can fall asleep cumming their pants to right wing hokum at 2 AM?
That's not real information
But hot dogs aren’t sandwiches they’re tacos. It perfectly logical to describe a hot dog as an American taco. If there were no taco items on the table and you asked for a taco I’d think you were being funny, but I’d pass you the hot dog.
Without pause? You're telling me that if you saw a table with xiaolongbao, hamburger, duba wot, pizza, Caesar salad, ice cream, hot dog, soondubu, and potato chips on it and I said "Please pass me that taco." you would hand me the hot dog without any hesitation? Even a fucking moment's worth?
Pause long enough to go “that’s different”, then hand you the hot dog, because only one of those items is a taco, even if it’s not commonly called a taco.
Then it's not a fucking taco. If it were a taco, it would be readily apparent what I meant. You have to parse my request and try to interpret what I could be meaning by taco as I'm using it in an incorrect way.
Language is meant to communicate meaning and if the language I use obfuscates my meaning it's being used incorrectly. It isn't clear that I meant hot dog when I said taco, hence your hypothetical pause.
So you're WRONG, but I do appreciate your honesty, thank you let's play again sometime
So if there were scrambled eggs and caviar on the table. You say pass the eggs and someone without hesitation hands over the caviar are they wrong?
Out of the two, does one look at caviar and truly think "eggs" first? Before eggs ?
They are a tie for me, because I think of them as salty fish eggs.
A sushi place had an egg roll (sushi, not egg rolls) and I thought it was the little fish eggs thing but was actually scrambled egg in a rectangle. My disappointment was immense.
Hm, I think I'd pass you the scrambled eggs first, but I may hesitate and or ask for clarification. This example is a little different because there is some element of ambiguity involved. The intent in the experiment is to create a situation with zero ambiguity other than the "wrong" answer. I think you've created a different situation, more akin to there being a tuna sub on the table along with the hot dog and asking for "the sandwich" which isn't nearly as good a test for this purpose.
For your test, there'd have to be nothing egg-like besides the caviar. At least for it to be using the same methodology the test I created uses.
I think it is a great example of expectations.
The hotdog and sandwich thing is silly because tacos are commonly thought of as a Mexican/Hispanic food and hot dogs are a US thing. Like how a chicken wrap and a chicken soft taco are different things even though both can have the same tortilla and chicken, with different vegetables and spices/flavorings. Chicken wraps are often cold, but can be served warm without becoming a taco!
It is a convoluted, arbitrary mess that only works because most people just go with the flow and don't really think about things beyond the surface level.
Tacos are sandwiches...