about that grilled cheese...

Look carefully at this screen capture of comedian Doug Benson's tweet. I plucked it from my Twitter feed (I follow Simon Pegg, who retweeted this):


In a bit of "The World's End"-related trivia (Simon Pegg's third movie in his "Cornetto Trilogy"; the first two movies were "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz") we see, above, a menu that includes, as one of its items, a grilled cheese! And contra what my brother Sean insisted to be the case, the menu still lists the sandwich's name as Grilled Cheese without modifying the title (written in large, boldface font), despite the fact that the sandwich includes bacon, apples, and onion in it. In fact, Benson also simply says "I had the grilled cheese," again without modification. Sean's argument was that to say "grilled cheese" when the sandwich contains more than just cheese is to create a misleading impression. Well, here's comedian Doug Benson doing just that, and not caring. The fact that he did do it is ample proof that it can be done. As one philosopher likes to say, esse implies posse: something's existence implies its possibility.

So this, Dear Reader, is yet more evidence in favor of my argument that you can indeed refer to grilled sandwiches—with more than cheese in them—simply as "grilled cheese." And if you misunderstood the speaker, when he said "I had the grilled cheese," because you assumed that "grilled cheese" meant "cheese only," then your misunderstanding was purely the result of your overly narrow conception of grilled cheeses.

Eat that.


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