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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.
shit
Is that the right word
I've been using "ontology" when talking about item classification to sound smart
I guess it worked bc no one said "You mean taxonomy, right?" yet. My illusion of pretending I'm not a dumbass to people IRL isn't broken yet I hope.
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
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.
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
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.