You already have an answer, and you’re already a little annoyed at whoever disagrees. That’s the interesting part. Not the hot dog. The annoyance.
Because nobody arrives at this question neutral. You walk in with a buried rule about what a sandwich fundamentally is. Some people classify by structure: what’s the bread doing and what’s between it. Some classify by function. Is it a handheld meal? Some by descent: what is this thing a version of. Three rules, three answers, and each person is certain the others are just being difficult.
Then someone says a taco fits the structural rule too, and you watch the bread crowd either bite the bullet or invent a new rule on the spot. Which gives away the game. The rule was never a principle. It was a rationalization of a gut call they’d already made.
And the ice cream sandwich? Nobody disputes the name. Nobody thinks it belongs in the argument. Which tells you the label and the category were never the same thing.
Here’s what I keep noticing. This is most content meetings I’ve ever sat in. Is this a landing page or an article. Where does this live. What do we call it. Nobody’s wrong. Everybody skipped the step where you say out loud which rule you’re using. The disagreement was settled before the meeting started, by assumptions no one put on the table.
But here’s the thing none of the taxonomy solves.
The best sandwich I ever had was an Italian from a Hudson Street bodega in New York on a split bun. A split bun. Arguably a hot dog roll. Disqualified by half the definitions above. It did not matter even a little. (The other one I think about is a BLT with a fresh, yellow tomato, which isn’t fighting anybody.)
The category tells you where a thing goes. It never tells you whether it’s any good.
We spend the whole meeting on the first question and forget to ask the second.
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