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Also. Remember the other day when I talked about sliding between distances when talking about whether things were the same or different? Yeah. Nitpicking about whether something is a sandwich or not (or pizza or not) is an exercise in doing that.
Like, everyone knows that when you say "let's go out for soup and sandwiches" you're not offering to go to a place that serves pop tarts & capn crunch. That's one level of categorization we're all familiar with.
When, at breakfast, one observes that "this capn crunch in milk is really a soup" is a whole different context, a completely different POV on the question. That's not an observation about who's right or wrong about food, it's a discussion about categories.
And "X kind of pizza isn't really pizza it's a casserole" is a whole other kind of statement. It looks like a declaration of category lines, but it's not, it's a food insult, and one I have no patience for.
All too often these get squished together with no acknowledgement that the squisher is speaking from two or more distances/levels of discussion. Because to acknowledge that one has slid from one to another would be to undermine their blithe superiority.
Anyway. Water's boiling and I'mma have some soup.
Or, here’s another one: “tomato is really a fruit, not a vegetable!” That one is squishing two entirely different systems of categorization together without acknowledging it! Like, the difference between “fruit” and “vegetable” is a culinary system of categorization.
The question of whether a tomato is a fruit is a botanical question. In that system, the whole category of ‘vegetable’ is basically meaningless. It’s a category from an entirely different system.
See also “well it’s the THEORY of evolution so it’s only a THEORY’ where the speaker is using (in either bad faith or ignorance) two different definitions/common uses of the word without acknowledging that.
I just think it’s important to recognize that there are different contexts and systems of categorization, and that we move from one to the other all the time, and it might be good to NOTICE that.
