A Story of Stolen Salamis
Maria S. Mendes
But first: what is a ‘sausage’? Here, the word allows unwary speakers to shred away what a specific kind of sausage is. As a result, its meaning has become undifferentiated: an all-purpose mass of minced meat. The reporter was more interested in producing a quaint little story than in accurately describing what had actually happened: newsflash was more important than its factual content. The narrator’s son commiserated about the loss of something he failed to understand, his misplaced show of sentiment being made apparent by the misused word. What ‘salamis’ means was stolen along with the salamis, dissolved into sausageness.
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