In the previous installment, on the 14th, there was “toss salad, fry shrimp, and other t/d ~ ∅”; on Facebook, John Lawler noted that toss salad (< tossed salad) sounds like chop salad (< chopped salad). So it does, both in meaning and in form.
Tossed salad and chopped salad are both types of salad, rather than specific salads — like bound salad (held together by a thick sauce, like mayonnaise) or fruit salad, rather than like Cobb salad or Waldorf salad. Beyond that, both names are subject to t/d-deletion in casual speech, and to lexicalization of the reduced variants toss salad and chop salad.
From a HuffPo piece of 4/29/15, with recipes for 13 chopped salads:
Chopped salads are just like regular salads, only with a different presentation — the ingredients are chopped, greens and all, and incorporated together instead of layered. It’s a minor detail, but one with lots of options.
Two examples:
(#1) Italian chopped salad (note the chickpeas)
(#2) Southwestern chopped salad (note the corn kernels, avocado, and cilantro)
Such salads are most often referred to as chopped salads (as above), but chop salad is an occasional variant, as in the Cabo Chop Salad offered by the Buckhorn Grill in S.F.
And there is a third variant, chop chop salad, as in an epicurious recipe from August 2017 and in the Palomino Chop Chop Salad from Chef Palomino’s Restaurants (under the management of Colombian-born Rafael Palomino: Sonora in Port Chester NY, Pacifico in New Haven CT and Center Valley PA, Tapas on Main in Bethlehem PA, Cachette in Bethlehem PA, Mesa Modern Mexican in Easton PA, Bistro Latino in Old Greenwich CT). The name is a portmanteau of chop chop and chop salad, where the first ingredient is (from NOAD) the
adv. & exclam. chop-chop: quickly; quick: “Two beers, chop-chop,” Jimmy called. ORIGIN mid 19th century: pidgin English, based on Chinese dialect kuaì-kuaì. Compare with chopstick [translating Chinese dialect kuàizi, literally ‘nimble ones’].
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