I don’t settle for half. I break mine into several segments of a couple of inches each. I don’t do swirling or twirling. (I do the same with other noodles, too, such as ramen, udon and soba.)
Technically, I do thirds. But I didn’t want to look too much like a freak. 
Maybe we should make a poll. “Do you break your spaghetti?” And see if there is a correlation between that and people who put ketchup on hotdogs. (100% correlation here)
I come from a part of the country where ketchup on hot dogs is absolutely 100% standard. So much that it is weird for me to imagine anyone who that is weird for.
I love ketchup on hotdogs, but prefer unbroken spaghetti.
I don’t completely mind ketchup on a hot dog (though I will not, by default, put it on), I prefer unbroken spaghetti, but the hot dogs much be natural casing, not skinless, if it wants to be a great hot dog. Skinless dogs are automatically out of the running with me. Once again, a textural/mouthfeel thing. If I’m going the make the trip to get a hot dog, it must be natural casing. At home, I’ll deal with a skinless, since I have to make a special trip to buy natural casing dogs, and the kids like the skinless anyway.
Absolutely true! I came here to comment on that abomination of breaking beautiful long strands of spaghetti into pieces of waste pasta, but you put it very well.
The thing is, there’s so much more to “taste” than a spectroscopic analysis of ingredients. Among many other things, what’s especially relevant here is form and texture. It’s the reason that I love long strands of thin spaghettini, rather than thicker stuff, and I consider broken spaghetti to be an abomination. Somewhat related to that, other factors that contribute to the enjoyment of a meal are the aesthetics of the presentation, the general atmosphere in which the meal is served, and the mood of the diners. We are complex beings and all those little things matter, but beyond flavour itself, form and texture are among the most fundamental contributors to what we call “taste”.
Of course there are such spaghetti lunghi still on sale! Here, with bronze drawing for better sticky sauce experience and all (it has a rough surface that helps the palate gather every nuance of a condiment in the original highfalutin’ advertisolese).
Be warned: there are people who never eat hotdogs (yes, that is me), so the correlation will break down both ways.
And, as so often on food matters, agreeing with pulykamell. It does change the mouthfeel. For worse.
I’m not going to argue personal taste, (and maybe you’re just being dryly funny) but in case you’re not, really, spaghetti length is arbitrary. Since it is made continuous, the 12" in the box is already broken.
And don’t even consider metric spaghetti!
Yes, my typical humour is as dry as my imported boxed spaghettini. But I’m serious about my strong preference here, personal taste though it may be.
I have other preferences, like eating spaghetti (or other noodles, like Singapore Noodles or any kind of Lo Mein) out of large shallow white noodle bowls rather than plates, but those kinds of things are a more subtle matter of presentation. This one is something I’m pretty adamant about!
I’m the only person I know that takes food from the microwave, and puts it on a proper plate rather than eat it from the container it was warmed up in.
@Just_Asking_Questions is right. Little things do add to the over all experience.
People who find it absolutely abhorrent to break or cut spaghetti into lengths that can be readily eaten, remind me of Calvin Trillin’s comment about Westerners who strive to look “authentic” when consuming Asian dishes by using chopsticks.
As I recall, he was happy to dispense with eating styles that handicapped his ability to eat quantities of food in an efficient manner.
Beyond inefficiency, the practice of creating negative mouth pressure so that you can inhale a long strand of spaghetti with an audible pop while spraying tiny droplets of sauce on your face is repellent. 
Spoon twirlers tend to be messy too.
Do you really believe that Italian measures follow the imperial units? Spaghetti lunghi are, of course, one meter long*. If that is not metric, I don’t know what is.
* With ample tolerance, of course. Hand made and all that…
No matter how long, you don’t need a spoon to eat spaghetti.
But long spaghetti is more efficient. I can get a lot more of it on my fork and into my mouth than short pieces. And I don’t slurp.
Yeah, no slurping. And if you’re making a messs twirling the spaghetti on your fork on the edge of your bowl/plate, you’re doing it wrong.
This part I don’t get bc I can twirl regular spaghetti and come up with a ball of pasta that is too big to stick in my pie hole.
12”? Sure. Break that in half as some suggest, there’s barely enough length to go around the fork even once. Balancing those short pieces atop my fork is a skill I don’t possess.
Kudos for at least having the class to cite Calvin Trillin, but this is likely another example of “dry” humour. I sometimes use chopsticks with certain types of Asian dishes in my own home when no one else is around. Who am I trying to impress? The reason I do it is that the particular mouthfuls and quantities thereof that chopsticks pick up are not at all the same as when, say, scraping the lot into one’s pie-hole with a fork and spoon.
One could argue that the most “efficient” way to eat, say, General Tso Chicken on rice, is to deliver it to the pie-hole with a large serving spoon. Any potential “messy” aspect could be mitigated by turning the head upwards, inserting a funnel, and dumping the contents of the serving spoon directly into said pie-hole. Sounds efficient to me!
For even more efficiency, one could dump the whole thing into a blender and package it into a large toothpaste-like squeeze tube. You could then just squeeze the stuff into your mouth and pretend you’re a gourmet astronaut!
Then you could open a “fine dining” gourmet restaurant featuring a menu with an enticing selection of large toothpaste squeeze tubes containing flavoured nutrients.
My wife is purebred Italian (though U.S. born) and cuts up her spaghetti. OTOH, she also complains about the smell of garlic frying, and doesn’t like pasta without a tomato-based sauce. I suspect she might have been switched at birth.
Same here. Chopsticks, I find, are extremely convenient, especially in eating long strands of noodles out of a bowl of broth. I have two daughters – 7 and 6 – and both insist on eating ramen with chopsticks. They’re otherwise normal kids, in that all they seem to eat is chicken fingers/nuggets, cereal, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and pasta. Nothing the least bit ethnically curious about their tastes, but chopsticks for ramen? That’s their preferred utensil. I find it extremely convenient myself and a hell of a lot easier to use than trying to tackle a bowl of long noodles and broth with Western utensils. They are also better for a myriad of other things, where picking up vs spearing is advantageous, like already cut up pieces of meat. (Or Cheetos if you don’t want to get your hands filthy.)
I have actually heard some native Italians complain about the sheer amount of garlic used in American-Italian cooking, so maybe she’s more Italian than you’d think. “Italian” != “must have garlic.”