The Best Thing Since Sliced Bread?

So the Super Wal-Mart near me has "Value Added" French Bread with garlic Parmesan, rosemary herb, "everything" topping, and a couple others. When my roommate or myself buys loaves of these bread we try to inspect as much as possible to check for air bubbles. (Because I'm not fond of gaping holes in my sandwich.) Sometimes we have to resort to buying unsliced bread rather than sliced bread either because the sliced all has air bubbles or there's just no sliced available.

So it's a little annoying to have to slice bread in the morning, but it's not too bad. Plus it actually gives you more control over your sandwich. It allows you to increase the ingredients to bread ratio without absolutely piling on the what you want in the sandwich. So while sliced bread is a nice convenience I don't quite see how it's the "greatest thing since sliced bread."

Wayland ...what do you think?

I don't think I like: "When my roommate or myself buys loaves of these bread..."; "this bread" surely.

If you had a large family to make lunch sandwiches for before packing them off to work and school you might think idfferently. When I was a small child un-sliced bread was the norm. We got our bread at a bakery in our Finnish neighborhood and when they bought a bread slicing machine it was considred a clear boon.

Nevertheless, I believe the phrase was originally intended to be ironic. ************* DAVE HATUNEN ( snipped-for-privacy@cox.net) ************* * Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow * * My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *

If you're going to nit-pick grammar, what about the use of "myself" there? Having it as the subject of that sentence isn't very good usage. Yes, there's no hard and fast rule that requires "myself" only in the case where it's a reflexive pronoun (the object of a sentence with the subject as the author), but still. Try removing the other person from the sentence, and you get "When myself buys loaves . . ."

Also, it should be "buy", I'd think, as the personal pronoun came second. I buy, you buy, he buys, she buys, etc.

It's a given that there will be at least one questionable or downright incorrect instance of usage in my text, by usenet rules.

Brian

In our last episode, , the lovely and talented Wayland broadcast on alt.usage.english:

You make sandwiches from baguettes? The horror! The horror!

It's OK as long as you slice them lengthwise. ************* DAVE HATUNEN ( snipped-for-privacy@cox.net) ************* * Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow * * My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *

(snip)

It's actually Italian bread, not French.

Eh, I knew it was one of those European counties.

Wayland ...style in search of a subject.

I just made a sandwich, it says French on the bag.

Wayland

I knew that from his description. If it was French Bread, as soon as he approached it with the knife it would surrender and slice itself.

I just took a look at the entry "French bread" in several online dictionaries. None of them appears to cover what is traditionally called "French bread" in the US. In particular, the dictionary definitions refer to a crisp crust, but as it is traditionally made in the US, French bread has a crust which is hardly more crisp than that of an ordinary American loaf of bread.

The definition at

From

Some of my French friends have indeed said that what is called "French bread" in the US is closer to Italian bread than it is to the French baguette. I once asked a native speaker of Swiss French what he thought of the French bread sold in the US--this was several years ago and there was no question that I was referring to the American-made product. He said it was "infect"--French for "vile."

-- Raymond S. Wise Minneapolis, Minnesota USA

E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com

If you buy the prebaked and packaged bread on teh shelves that's what you'll get. But fresh-baked bread at the bakery is pretty good.

Not always that easy to find, of course, except in certain areas of the US. Now that we're here in Tucson one of the things we really miss about our years in and around San Francisco is the bread, especially the sourdough, which isn't teh same here at all.

I think "the greatest thing since sliced bread" is actually meant as a bit of sarcasm. In other words, not so great at that.

In the 1950's and 60's we said "the greatest thing since canned beer."

Brian Wickham

That seems to be a good description of what is called "French bread" in Australian supermarkets. It has absolutely no crunchiness, and its only similarity to a baguette is the shape. It's made in only small quantities, presumably because nobody who has ever tasted it would ever bother to buy it again.

On the other hand, we have a few (not many) "French bread shops", usually run by Vietnamese, and many of these make genuine baguettes. The trick to it, I'm told, is to have the sort of oven that can get hot enough. The air inlet has to be placed properly with respect to the prevailing wind, and you get the best bread on windy days.

One disadvantage of a baguette, and indeed of French bread in general, is that it goes stale very quickly. It's therefore essential to buy the bread just before the meal, and to throw away what's left; there's no question of saving half a baguette for tomorrow. (This also is why French bread is unsuitable for sandwiches that you can take to work. By lunchtime, your sandwich is stale.) This means, of course, that a baguette is unsuitable for a person living alone, unless you have a prodigious appetite. When I lived briefly in France, my solution was to buy a "ficelle" on the way home from work and use it for the evening meal. The ficelle is similar to a baguette but is very much thinner, so it's just the right size for one person's worth of sandwich. Unfortunately, I've never been able to buy une ficelle anywhere in Australia.

"Peter Moylan" , in , a écrit:

In fact, it's a bread-stick, yes?

Aha! A linguistic discrepancy! In BrE, a "breadstick" is one of those crunchy Italian jobs called "grissini". As at:

--=20 Mike.

There is a Vietnamese restaurant and bakery here in Orlando that makes small (about 6" long) loaves of French bread with a crust that is sharp enough to shave with. They must be eaten either on premises or at least within a few hours of leaving the premises because they go stale so fast.

It's an unpretentious place with a few tables, food served from behind the counter, and the only decor touch a bad copy of a French horse racing print that is hung crookedly. So unpretentious that they call the mini-baguettes "rolls" and sell them for 50 cents or three for a dollar.

Brian Wickham had it:

Not in the UK it isn't. It carries no sarcasm here.

I don't think I can agree with that. Even people who buy the typical stodgy wrapped sliced loaf know it's inferior -- and I'm sure that's what "sliced bread" usually conjures up, not good bread put through the baker's machine as you buy it. And in any case, for the expression to be meant literally, a significant number of people would have to believe that there really had been no better recent invention: that seems highly unlikely, no?