What’s the George Carlin bit? A stewardess told me to get on the plane and I said, “Fuck that, I’m getting in the plane!” I guess the joke is mostly in the delivery (which is a whole other discussion about whether or not that qualifies as a joke), but it does succinctly bring up something that people tend not to think about. And that’s not a judgement on anyone. Language is one of those things that, in order to be able to live your life, well, you just don’t pull at those threads. And there are a million of these little language failures that anyone could point to. There’s just one that I really like, which brings me to breakfast.
As always, define your terms first. Breakfast, as far as I can tell, is three things:
- A meal you eat in the morning
- after a long rest
- consisting of a particular types of predetermined breakfast foods, e.g., scrambled eggs, pancakes, ect.
However, none of these facets individually are that important. In response to the first point, McDonald’s serves breakfast all day and I’ve certainly eaten “breakfast for dinner.” As far as the second point goes, I’ve pulled an all nighter and went to Denny’s afterwards for a Grand Slam. Additionally, I’ve taken a nap in the middle of the day and had something for breakfast at like three in the afternoon. Finally, who among us hasn’t eaten cold pizza or ice cream for breakfast?
It appears that for a meal to qualify as breakfast, it needs only to have one of the three aspects of breakfast, however, not a single one of them is an essential property because in other scenarios any one of them can be taken away without taking away the meal’s breakfastness.