One of the breakfast specials at the Palo Alto Creamery this morning was (FCWB):
Fried Chicken Waffle Benedict
That’s parsed:
[ [ Fried Chicken ] Waffle ] [ Benedict ]
‘eggs Benedict on a fried chicken waffle’, that is, on a waffle with (Southern) fried chicken on it. (Actually, the original is short for Fried Chicken Waffle Eggs Benedict, but that would have been too long to get on the specials board.)
Immediately, I wondered if FCWB was a subsective compound — did this thing count as an instance of a Benedict, that is, as eggs Benedict? — or was its name resembloid, the dish merely (metaphorically) Benedict-like? (See the Page on this blog about postings on resembloid composites.) My immediate judgment was clear: for me, FCWBs are just too far from the BENEDICT category: the waffle too distant from an English muffin, the fried chicken too distant from a slice of ham, and anyway the thing came with maple syrup, as (soul-food) chicken waffles do, and sweet Benedicts are way over the line for me.
But then I looked at recipes on the net, where the world of things called Benedict is far larger than my Benedict world, and where cooks make FCWBs and restaurants serve them. And I felt obliged to entertain the possibility that there are people who think that the BENEDICT category (with dishes called Benedicts in it) includes FCWBs in it. The answer to the query about the status of the compound might well be: resembloid for some, subsective for others. That wouldn’t be unparalleled.
