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Comment by andrewla | Hacker News Reader

I'm a sandwich descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist. I know what a sandwich is, and any definition that say that a hot dog is a sandwich or that a sub/hero/hoagie is not a sandwich is a definition that I do not accept.

Similarly, a bagel with cream cheese (that is, both halves of the bagel sandwiching cream cheese) is not a sandwich (despite the use of the word "sandwiching" in the definition), but a bagel with turkey inside is a sandwich.

I'm comfortable without a definition, though I look forward to hearing the reports of the intrepid theoreticians that can yield definitions that satisfy these criteria, much as I laud the efforts of the adjective-ordering folk in descriptive grammar.

My rule of thumb is that if I went into a restaurant and asked the waiter "I want a sandwich, but I don't care what kind -- surprise me!" and they brought me an object, how angry would I be at the waiter who brought me that object.

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> any definition that say that a hot dog is a sandwich or that a sub/hero/hoagie is not a sandwich is a definition that I do not accept.

Isn't that still prescriptivism? Descriptivism here would mean noting what people claim constitutes sandwichhood, and maybe noting what people's behavior reveals about what they actually do or don't treat as a sandwich. But it would be prescriptivist to assert a new definition of sandwichhood, even if you argue that it's somehow more motivated than others.

I am a scientist, and any experiment that demonstrates a hypothesis I do not like is an experiment I do not accept.

I am a scientist and clearly am earning millions from Big Sandwich to define the applicability of sandwichness to hot dogs. Please do not subpoena my email.

I think they mean they side with Wittgenstein over Plato, but I don't know what to call the two stances.

They're clearly a descriptivist only of their own behavior. It's a very Cartesian approach.

By descriptively I mean that I do not believe that we should model our usage after rules which were derived from usage, but instead should examine our usage and attempt to model it.

A prescriptivist says that a pronoun should match the number, gender, and human-ness of its antecedent, and therefore “they” is not acceptable when referring to a single person. A casual descriptivist says that they understand what it means when other people use “they” in a singular fashion, and find that it is a useful construct. A formal descriptivist would try to describe how the usage and clarity is practically evolving over time. The terms “pronoun” and “antecedent” are terms themselves modeled from actual usage, rather than some organizing committee that decided how English should work.

Similarly for sandwich definition. The descriptivist viewpoint says that no strict definition is necessary; that people have a casual understanding and should model their usage on that. A prescriptivist says “here is a definition of ‘sandwich’ that models a significant number of things that many people agree are sandwiches, so we expand that definition and use that to label things as sandwich or not sandwich, regardless of the common understanding”.

The key point here is that I do not feel a strict definition is necessary in order to reasonably discuss sandwich labeling.

Practically speaking, I have found that my heuristic above generally yields agreement from others (in particular, I have not yet found anyone who would be happy with a hot dog under those circumstances), with occasional differences of opinion that would be interesting for a professional sandwichologist to examine as a question of sandwichial drift over time.

Prescriptivism versus descriptivism is ultimately about what is more important: is the set of rules primal, or are the labeling of examples primal? Both people would agree that an utterance like "dragon they q" is not grammatical. But when faced with an utterance such as "me and John went to the park," the descriptivist would say that it occurs frequently enough that it ought to be considered grammatical, and that we should understand what the properties of "me" are to allow it to be grammatical, whereas the prescriptivist would object that "me" is an object pronoun and therefore cannot appear in a compound subject phrase so that people who utter such a sentence are not uttering grammatical sentences.

Or put differently: if reality and models differ, a descriptivist says that the models are wrong, while a prescriptivist says that reality is wrong.

> My rule of thumb is that if I went into a restaurant and asked the waiter "I want a sandwich, but I don't care what kind -- surprise me!" and they brought me an object, how angry would I be at the waiter who brought me that object.

Despite the fact that you're clearly a mental patient who thinks that a bagel with some meat inside can be a sandwich, you have my upvote for that line:-)

Seriously, though, that's actually a pretty good criterion. Reminds me of Justice Potter Stewart's comment about knowing it when he sees it: if I ask for X, someone gives me Y & I'm angry, then Y is not in the class of X to a degree directly correlated with my anger at the result. I dig it!

> Similarly, a bagel with cream cheese (that is, both halves of the bagel sandwiching cream cheese) is not a sandwich (despite the use of the word "sandwiching" in the definition), but a bagel with turkey inside is a sandwich.

What if instead of cream cheese it is a slice of lettuce, some cheese, and some mayo, for a veggie sandwich?

Remove the lettuce, now what?

Does lettuce, green colored water, define it as a sandwich? Or is it the presence of a solid type of cheese versus spreadable? Is brie + lettuce in a bagel a sandwich while brie alone is not?

Remove the cheese, just leave the mayo. Now what? Add back in the lettuce (say the eater is lactose intolerant), does it become a sandwich again?

> What if instead of cream cheese it is a slice of lettuce, some cheese, and some mayo, for a veggie sandwich?

I’ll go ahead and stop you here; no, what you have is not a sandwich. By which I guess I mean that it is not an unqualified sandwich in the same sense that an open-faced sandwich is not a sandwich. If I directly ordered either nobody would think me odd, or if the waiter asked me “is a veggie sandwich okay” I wouldn’t think him crazy. Oddly enough, a grilled cheese would be fine as an unqualified sandwich.

I’ll turn this around and ask you to do the thought experiment. If you were the waiter at a lunch counter and someone ordered a sandwich and said they didn’t care what kind, would you give them a veggie sandwich, playing the odds? Would you as a customer feel okay getting that response? Or another similar thought experiment of your own devising where you would feel comfortable with that usage?

Plenty of places sell vegetarian sandwiches. 50 cents of thin sliced turkey does not a sandwich make.

> Would you as a customer feel okay getting that response?

I've had some great veggie sandwiches, the one I described above wasn't a great example, it was purposefully minimalist to prove a point.

Shove some sliced grilled eggplant on there and it'd all be good.

And how in the world are you OK with a grilled cheese being a sandwich but if someone pokes a hole in the bread and uses cream cheese it now is no longer a sandwich?

Is a grilled cheese sandwich with a circular hole cut out of the center a sandwich? What if it isn't grilled? I'm trying to understand where is the line is here!

For what it's worth, my entire point is that there is no line. A line is completely unnecessary. Just like a native English speaker doesn't need to be told what the rule is for adjective ordering -- "the big red dog" sounds right, "the red big dog" sounds wrong.

I've had perfectly fine veggie sandwiches, when I've ordered vegetarian sandwiches, but that wasn't my question -- would you, personally, consider that to be a reasonable response if you went into a random restaurant, or if you were asked to prepare a sandwich for a customer who said they didn't care what kind of sandwich?

I'm not asking rhetorically -- I'm genuinely curious. People do differ on this; many people I talk to disagree on the bagel question, and consider both variants a sandwich or consider neither one a sandwich. My theory here is that I grew up eating bagels at home and not at restaurants, so would eat my bagels with cream cheese open faced, and not sandwiched between the two halves, so I never really created the association with being a sandwich; while people who consider it a sandwich grew up in cities where you got a bagel from a store or deli, where it is pretty much universally served with the two halves stacked, and thus is more sandwich-like during developmental years.

Would you feel comfortable, without knowing the customer, giving them such a minimalist veggie sandwich and still expect that they would be satisfied that you've obeyed the broad parameters?

I believe the term you're looking for is "particularist", by analogy with moral particularism:

"Moral particularism is the view that there are no moral principles and that moral judgement can be found only as one decides particular cases, either real or imagined." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_particularism

I think I have seen a proof that any algorithm which decides whether or not something is a sandwich in general can be used to decide whether or not a turing machine halts on no inputs.

That only works if your sandwich bread is made of rice flour, hence the name The Rice Theorum.

Since you've put a lot more thought into classifying food than I have, perhaps you can answer this question:

Breakfast cereal: Soup, or not?

If I went to a restaurant and ordered soup (surprise me!) and they gave me a bowl of cereal, I would likely have my goons come back and torch the place.

I mean, if they gave me gazpacho or a cold melon soup I also would not be thrilled, but I would not accuse them of violating the conditions that I had laid out.

Cereal isn’t soup, but soup is cereal. Crackers on top just seal the deal.

I have had this thought before. I think cereal & milk is a cold, often sweet soup with a simple dairy broth (milk).

I suggest training a tensorflow model with foodstuffs labelled by a large group of, say, 100,000 human volunteers, carefully selected to be demographically representative.

Only then can we know the truth.

Given that you're clearly aware that different people have vastly different definitions of "sandwich," how could you justify being angry at all if all you ordered was any unspecified sandwich?

Yes, different definitions, but most people in usage don’t start from a definition and proceed to usage; they start from usage. In this case, I am explicitly rejecting the notion that there is a definition that matches usage (both mine and others).

My experience, anecdotally, is that given the rule of thumb above and similar thought experiments, there is not a lot of variation in the practical usage of the word sandwich.

Opposition mainly comes from people who attempt to apply an arbitrary rule and are not willing to revise that rule to match their own usage for the sake of the argument. In other words, overthinking. Or a pathological case of Occam’s razor.

What if you cut the hot dog in half, split the halves lengthwise and put them between two pieces of bread. Is it a sandwich then?

Yes, that'd be a hot dog sandwich.

Or put it in a cuboid New England roll or a roll more typically used for sandwiches as would be needed to wrap larger hot dogs and sausages. The problem is really the mass market minimalist hot dog roll.

I would love to hear your thoughts on the infamous melt versus grilled cheese debate.

Using my rule of thumb above: if I asked the waiter for a grilled cheese, but I didn't care what kind, I expect the waiter would be somewhat perplexed by this, since "grilled cheese" is a sufficient descriptor that there's basically one sandwich that satisfies the description.

If I asked for a melt but didn't care what kind, then I feel like the possibilities expand, and would include a regular grilled cheese.

> Using my rule of thumb above: if I asked the waiter for a grilled cheese, but I didn't care what kind, I expect the waiter would be somewhat perplexed by this, since "grilled cheese" is a sufficient descriptor that there's basically one sandwich that satisfies the description.

Even if you take grilled cheese narrowly enough that it must have nothing but cheese between the bread, there are a fairly wide array of potential breads and potential cheeses and combinations of cheeses that there is definitely more than one sandwich that fits the description, even before considering that, in use, “grilled cheese” allows for additional ingredients.

True, there's a wide space of breads and cheeses, but I can walk into a restaurant and order a grilled cheese and with no follow-up questions be served the restaurant's version a grilled cheese. The same could not be said of ordering a "sandwich"; the waiter would certainly demand clarification before accepting the order.

The conversation could go like this, "I'll have a grilled cheese" -- "What kind of cheese?" -- "surprise me" -- "What kind of bread?" -- "surprise me" -- "Do you want tomato or bacon or any other meats?". At this point I'd have to stop and figure out which way I wanted to go. But that's reasonable because these are non-default options; if I asked for a surprise sandwich and the waiter asked me "is open-faced okay" or "is ice cream sandwich okay" or "is a wrap okay" then I'd totally accept that as a clarification, but without that clarification none of those would be acceptable.

As someone who regularly eats "grilled cheese with stuff on it" (bell pepper slices are awesome), the distinction hinges on whether the cheese holds the sandwich together. If the halves can be easily separated, it's not grilled cheese.

Interesting - a functionality test!

The Portuguese standard here is a grilled cheese and ham toastie. Just cheese is less common but popular-ish, heathens (e.g. me) might ask for just ham.

You mean "cheese on toast"? (UK)

Main difference is that a "grilled cheese" is two slices with cheese in between (usually).

Cheese on Toast is, by its very name, where the cheese is on the toast. An open-faced grilled cheese if you will.

Cheese on toast (UK) only consists of one slice of bread/toast. It is not a sandwich.

In the UK it is known as "grilled cheese sandwich" or perhaps "toasted cheese sandwich".

Grilled cheese would be, I assume, Halloumi. Melted cheese is pretty much any other cheese (Cheddar, Edam, Stilten, Gouda, Brie, etc)?

EDIT: TFA is talking about a grilled-cheese sandwich; i.e. a toasted cheese sandwich.

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