The people from Merriam-Webster — the “most trustworthy dictionary and thesaurus of American English” — trolled Twitter on Friday by officially declaring that the hot dog is, in fact, a sandwich.
Needless to say, the tweet didn’t sit too well with frankfurter fans.
“Stop it. No one has ever been in the mood for a sandwich and bought a hot dog. They’re not the same thing,” fumed ESPN reporter Arash Markazi.
“Anyone who thinks the hot dog is a sandwich can go ahead and unfollow me immediately or get kicked in the shin,” added Dijana Kunovac.
Tweeting directly at Merriam-Webster, user @JoeRoobol wrote, “this is terrorism,” while Kevin Morrell said, “this tweet made me an @OED convert,” in reference to the Oxford English Dictionary.
It’s ultimately a question that has plagued humanity for years: Is the hot dog a sandwich?
While families, friends and even experts have taken part in the debate, Merriam-Webster decided to officially weigh in on Friday — ahead of a holiday weekend that brings barbecues from coast to coast.
“We know: the idea that a hot dog is a sandwich is heresy to some of you. But given that the definition of sandwich is “two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between,” there is no sensible way around it,” they wrote on their website. “If you want a meatball sandwich on a split roll to be a kind of sandwich, then you have to accept that a hot dog is also a kind of sandwich.”
And for those thinking that the hot dog sausage does not qualify as a “filling,” Merriam-Webster has an explanation for that, too.
“If you choose to interpret filling narrowly as only “a food mixture used to fill pastry or sandwiches,” rather than broadly as “something used to fill a cavity, container, or depression,” then you’re not going to allow any single-item filling to qualify a food item as a sandwich—which means there can be no thing as a peanut butter sandwich or a bologna (or even baloney) sandwich,” they said. “Hence, a hot dog is a sandwich.”
Still, the concept was hard to swallow for some.
“Hot dog a sandwich? How dare you, Merriam-Webster?!?” seethed Twitter user @drdrbrockman.
“You’re wrong. The hot dog is not, and never will be, a sandwich,” wrote Taylor Mooney.
Christian Ash concluded, “The Hot Dog is the American Taco. It is far from a damn sandwich.”