Snail Salad

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

In a message dated 1/27/03 1:39:08 AM, Bapopik at AOL.COM writes:


>    "Snail salad" is not in John Mariani's ENCYCLOPEDIA OF AMERICAN FOOD AND
> DRINK.  Will it be in the next volume of DARE?
> 

Is this a regionalism? If not, DARE won't have it. And shouldn't.

In fact, should any dictionary list SNAIL SALAD?

Should it really be a lexical entry in any reference work except MAYBE 
something so specialized as an ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FOOD? Or a cookbook? If one 
thinks of all the things that one could make a salad out of, it would take a 
book as big as a volume of DARE just to list them all. 

We could call it "Barry's Dictionary of Salad," and each of the zillion 
entries could list the earliest date that Barry could find for each one after 
traveling the world and reading salad menus and old newspapers.

In 1973&1974 we used the following sentence as a repetition test for North 
Carolina informants: "We both like to eat snail salad often." I thought we 
were making up "snail salad" -- at any rate no one in North Carolina had ever 
eaten such a thing. We thought that the absurdity (to our North Carolina 
informants) of eating snails would distract our subjects from focussing any 
attention on the pronunciation of the final fricative in "both."