cold cuts.

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Tue Aug 31 18:46:32 UTC 2010


On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 7:44 AM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
> Â I include ham, corned beef,
> pastrami, etc. Â (And they required the presence of cheese.) Â _As does
> the OED_ (except for the cheese).

Different strokes for different folks, I reckon.

BTW, what's up with the constant appeals to authority? Is a person to
be considered at least ill-informed, if not insane, if his concept of
reality doesn't jibe with some printed definition? I thought that this
was a site about the way English *is* spoken, not about the way
English perhaps *was* spoken by a defined subset of its
native-speakers, at the the time that some once-authoritative
reference work was compiled.

As for the inclusion of cheese among meats, this was once so foreign
to the black-American palate that, in my Army days a half-century ago,
we United States Colored Troops distinguished ourselves as
_hamburgers_, as opposed to white GI's, to whom we referred as
_cheeseburgers_.

Of course, the past half-century of desegregation and advertising has
worked its wiles and, had I any grandchildren, they would, no doubt,
be amazed to discover that their granddad is grossed out by the
thought of something as simple as a ham-&-cheese, let alone a
full-blown <choke! gasp!> *cheese*burger!
--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"––a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
–Mark Twain

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