Irrefutable facts of culinary classification

[muckefuck]

Ever since reading Lakoff, I've been sensitivised to conceptual categories. It's always fun to realise that your brain has classified something in a way that's non-obvious to other speakers, but is so natural to you that you're not even aware of it until there's a miscommunication.

For instance, last night at dinner monshu talked about serving something "with the beans". I had to think about it for a moment, because I was sure he'd said that our starch was going to be potatoes (a.k.a. "the Great Satan"). Turned out he was referring to the green beans, which I never in hundred years would've classified as "beans". They're a green vegetable; they require no soaking or boiling in order to eat. Canned is not an acceptable substitute. I wouldn't put them in a soup or a stew. And so on and so forth.

Other revelations which employ the same type of interaction-based logic:

1. "Chickpeas" are not "peas". Neither are "pigeon peas". Only "green peas" are "peas" (to the point that "green peas" sounds pleonastic to me). And for those of you who call them "garbanzo beans", they aren't "beans" either.
2. "Hot dogs" are not "sausages". And this holds whether you call them "franks", "frankfurters", "red hots", or god-know-what. It doesn't matter that they are encased meats or that bratwursts and their ilk also show up regularly on buns.
3. "Cream cheese" is not "cheese". Neither is anything that looks and tastes similar, like Quark/Topfen or Neufchâtel. I'm not sure what to do with mascarpone, but ricotta is also "cheese" and "cottage cheese" isn't. (As far as I'm concerned, cottage cheese isn't even edible, but that's neither here nor there.)
4. "Soda water" is not "soda". "Soda" is artificially coloured and flavoured and sweetened.

I don't expect all of you to agree on these, and I don't think that difference is necessary dialectal; it wouldn't shock me if my own brother, raised with the same (godawful) food traditions differed with me on one or more of these. (After all, he's wrong about so many, many things.)

Comments

[richardthinks.livejournal.com]

In Brazilian Portuguese you can easily start unendable arguments by using the word "salsicha," which allegedly means sausage, but never the kind of sausage under discussion, which is properly a linguica. After about a decade I've more or less figured out that salsicha only reliably means hot dog.

...and Shaggy, from Scooby Doo.