Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Zippy continues on his quest for something different to eat:

Maybe he could have ordered un sous-marin:

Un sandwich sous-marin (submarine sandwich, surnommé “sub”) est une variété de sandwich américain constituée d’une baguette de pain. Il contient typiquement de la viande, du fromage, de la laitue, de la tomate et divers condiments, sauces ou assaisonnements. (link)

The sous-marins in illustrations vary considerably in form (as do the illustrations for submarine sandwiches (or subs). Some of them are not especially submarine-shaped, either because they’re portions of a longer sandwich, sliced off:

or because they look like ordinary sandwiches, but with sous-marin-esque ingredients:

(Both of these objects are labeled sous-marins.)

This brings me to a complication that came up in a comment on my previous Zippy-sub posting: the taxonomy of food types involved here, the bases for distinguishing types (I hesitate to say sub-types), and the terminology that goes along with all of this.

The large taxon embraces a variety of sandwiches with ingredients stuffed into a roll of some sort. The central members of the taxon are sub-like in form (long and thin) and contents (sliced meats and cheeses), though different sorts of rolls are used in different types, and you can move away from these canonical examples in several ways: po’boys/po’ boys can have a huge variety of alternative contents (I am especially fond of oyster po’boys); muffulettas are traditionally made with rounded rolls; subs (by any name) can be sliced so as to provide more manageable individual servings (of not very submarine-like appearance); apparently for some people even the roll can be replaced by sliced bread, yielding an overstuffed sandwich tending in the direction of a Dagwood sandwich (but only one bread layer); and so on.

This entry was posted on August 24, 2011 at 7:52 am and is filed under Categorization and Labeling, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Variation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.