HOTDOG TAXONOMY

I’m lying awake wondering whether a hotdog is a sandwich. My heart says no, but there’s just no adequate proof: it is, after all, a handheld bread arrangement containing a filling.

I know what you’re thinking: a sandwich is two separate slices of bread. It’s great logic, but if I buttered one slice of bread and smothered it with marmalade, then folded the whole thing in half, I would definitely have created a marmalade sandwich, even though it would be hinged exactly like a hotdog.

Perhaps it’s the type of bread. Hotdogs are usually in rolls that have been sliced lengthways to accommodate a lovely sausage. I don’t think I would put a sausage in a slice of buttered Hovis and call it a hotdog. That, self-evidently, is a sausage sandwich.

But then I would probably call it a sandwich if I buttered one of those rolls and wedged a bit of cheese and ham in there. At a push it’s a cheese and ham roll, but in that lunchbox universe, a roll feels like it might be a specific type of sandwich.

So is a hotdog then, also a type of sandwich? Is 'sandwich' the family name for anything that goes between bits of bread, and roll and hotdog are both types of that thing? And anyway, if that’s true, why is a hotdog not just a hot sausage roll? And then what do you call the thing we currently call hot sausage rolls, because I’m certain that they’re absolutely not sandwiches... or hotdogs for that matter.

I need to go to sleep. I can’t even remember what kicked this whole thing off, but it seems a ridiculous thing to be worrying about at 1 am. Can I just say that a hotdog is not a sandwich because my heart doesn’t want it to be, and that’s that? I’m happy to give up reason tonight if I can exchange it for going to sleep. And don’t even get me started on what McDonalds call their burgers.