The secret life of Snail Salad

[Laurence Horn]

True, to the extent you consider a conch/whelk to be a snail.  I have
different mental lexicon entries for snails/escargots and for
conchs/scungilli.  The former is a mollusk eaten in French
restaurants with butter and garlic stuffed stuffed into its shell by
means of that funny escargot-grasping apparatus; the latter is a
mollusk sliced thin (perhaps after hammering flat) and then served in
an Italian vinagrette-type salad preferably with hot peppers, or with
cocktail sauce, or cooked with other sea-creatures in a seafood pasta
or such.  The former is soft and squishy, the latter crunchy.  (And
yes, they're both great, but the former has too much cholesterol.)
The fact that one might not be familiar with "scungilli" as a lexical
item doesn't make "scungilli salad" opaque, since it's denotation is
still computable from that of its parts. If you tell me that they eat
okapi salad somewhere in Africa, I still wouldn't put that in my
lexicon if it's a salad made from okapi, even if don't know an okapi
from a hole in the ground.  Accessible =/= transparent.  (I chose
that one by opening a dictionary at random to the page including
"okapi".)

  I will concede, though, that the opacity or transparency of "snail
salad" with reference to one made of scungilli is not transparent,
since it depends on one's representation for "snail".

larry

At 12:19 PM -0500 1/29/03, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>In a message dated 1/29/03 11:39:58 AM, laurence.horn at YALE.EDU writes:
>>
>I agree with Ron's theoretical point, and now that Sal has provided
>us with the relevant datum, I agree with Barry's contention that
>"snail salad" (meaning 'scungilli salad') should be listed because of
>its opacity.  I also agree with Sal's "yum".  I knew I liked
>scungilli salad, I just didn't know I'd ever eaten snail salad, since
>we don't call it that in Connecticut.  In fact the use of "snail
>salad" in place of "scungilli salad" in R.I. is sort of the reverse
>of the almost ubiquitous reference to squid as calamari (well, in
>European-style restaurants as opposed to Chinese- or Thai-style
>ones).  Dysphemism rather than euphemism.  The parallel to the
>"calamari" case was the fact that when I was much younger, snails
>were always referred to in restaurants as "escargots".  And the
>seasoning was called "escargot butter", not "snail butter".
>
>Larry, wondering if "conch salad" isn't used because nobody outside
>of Key West is sure of how to pronounce "conch" >>
>
>Well,  dunno that SNAIL SALAD is "opaque' just because it is made with
>scungilli. It seems to me that SNAIL SALAD is more accesible than SCUNGILLI
>SALAD! WHAT THE HELL IS A SCUNGILLI, I'd like to know--and I would look that
>up in my dictionary. Isn't a sungilli just a kind of snail? If people in Iowa
>make my potato salad with red potatoes should we say that POTATO SALAD is a
>regionalism for RED POTATO SALAD? It seems to me that Larry is suggesting
>that we need a dictionary entry for SNAIL SALAD simply because it is
>sometimes made with peculiar kinds of snails. Do I really need my unabridged
>dictionary to tell me that SNAIL SALAD is sometimes made with conche? Do I
>need to have an entry for DOG SALAD if some people make it only with a poodle?
>
>I was carefully tutored to say /kank/ during a recent trip to Granada.