You can rub it on if you want, dear… 
Or the bones are left in the frogs. 
You know the story that ends:
SALESGIRL: Is yours raisin too?
OLD MAN: Nope. But it’s twitchin’ a mite! 
You cracked me up. 
Both of you!!
I’m not even gonna touch that one! 
Goes without saying. Potato salad is not really a salad at all without crunchy frog.
And if we took the bones out, they wouldn’t be crunchy, would they? 
Don’t let them say it’s unhealthy.
All frogs are crunchy, my friend. Unless you de-bone them first (which is something that simply isn’t done).
Never mind.
See post 106.
Yeah, potato salad, tuna salad, egg salad, chicken salad .. those aren’t what i mean by “salad”. Although i guess they are all related to each other. I don’t really like any of them (except tuna for whatever reason), so I don’t have a name for them collectively.
that was my original question, apparently not well though, how did non-leafy green leaf concoctions get called “salad”
And certainly not fruit salad!
When I say I’m going to “get a salad”, I don’t mean any of those, even if they have names including the word “salad”.
If I was going to “fix” our language I’d just replace the misleading word “salad” with the more generic but more accurate word “mix”. I’ll have a tuna mix sandwich, with a potato mix on the side. To me that works.
I’m not going to fix the language though. “Salad” it is.
Just throwing into the mix here the etymology of the word “salad”, from classical Latin herba salata or “salted vegetables”, generally meaning fresh greens dressed primarily with salt, oil and vinegar.
The “mixedness” aspect took over from the “raw greensness” aspect as a defining feature of a salad a long time ago.
I answered this based on what I found. It comes from a word meaning salt, and was short for herba salata, which literally means “salted vegetables”, but refers to an Ancient Roman dish of raw leafy vegetables, salt water, oil, and vinegar. Other garden vegetables were added, and new dressings were used over time.
They fell out of favor after the fall of Rome, but were rediscovered in the Renaissance, and that’s when other items began to be added, using up other scraps. By that time vegetarianism wasn’t super popular and so people were adding meat, as well as other combinable items, mixing in stuff from their own local uncooked, combined ingredient dishes.
The dressings also got much elaborate, and the greens became less important. The term salad grew to encompass combined ingredients with dressing, and were often very fancy dishes with elaborate sauces. And one of those new sauces was mayonnaise.
And that brings us to the bound salads. With the advent of refrigeration, mayo spread beyond its origin of a fancy French sauce into a mass market food, and with it people started mimicking those fancy French bound salads, using mayo to hold them together. Gelatin is another previously expensive item that has the same treatment, hence “jello salads.”
The garden salads of course continued to exist, and other variations like the fruit salad, or salads with pickled ingredients, and yes, even hot salads were among those more generic salads I mentioned earlier. Any dish that was made up of combined ingredients would get combined with or just recategorized as a type of salad. And, of course, you could also remove the dressing and still call the mixed greens and garden veggies a salad.
The term grew to encompass a way of combining ingredients without cooking them (even if some of the ingredients may have previously been cooked–you didn’t tend to eat raw meat, after all), and usually providing some sort of sauce. But the garden salad still remains the default when the term is used by itself.
Yes, pretty much this. I think the closest we can come to a workable definition is “a bunch of stuff, usually one or more vegetables, mixed together and seasoned with a dressing, and meant to be served cold”. That encompasses your typical leafy green garden salad and all its many variants, cucumber salad, tuna salad, pasta salad, potato salad, and pretty much all the others.
Thank you very much, Mr T, for your response, THAT was the answer I sought in OP!! You’re the man!
Glad to help, hon. But I’m not a Mr. :3
Ms T, then. 