Eating discs: a rant.

In the ancient and excellent BBC TV series Yes Prime Minister the European authorities, keen for clarity, insisted that the type of sausage traditionally consumed in Britain should be relabelled a high-fat offal tube.

That was fiction; but now there is similar a real-life proposal. It is called Amendment 41, and it has been proposed by the European Parliament's Agriculture Committee. It would ban the use of the word sausage if the said sausage does not contain meat.

(I must point out here that the word milk to describe vegetable-based milks has already been banned.)

The suggestion is that it might be better to call a vegetable sausage a tube; and there is a further suggestion to rename a vegetable burger a disc.

Meat producers seem fairly pleased about this, but vegetarians are exasperated. Who, the vegetarians demand, is going to want to eat a tube or a disc when they can have a sausage or a burger?

In any case, argues Mark Banahan, campaigns and policy officer for the Vegan Society, the words burger and sausage don't call to mind only the contents of the products, but also their texture and shape, and how they are served and cooked.

Meat producers, on the other hand, conjure up horrifying visions of consumers, expecting a mouthful of meaty goodness, deceived into trudging through dinners of mashed lentils spiked with onion powder.

What do you think? 

For myself, I'm afraid that the EU Parliament's Agricultural Committee has got above itself. Language is a wild thrusting lively beast, and those who seek to control it are likely to find themselves in reviled, resented, and ignored. 

They should remember Humpty Dumpty, who believed that words mean what he said they meant.

And we all know what happened to him.

Word To Use Today: burger. This word is short for Hamburger steak, that is, steak in the style served in Hamburg in Germany. 

Whether the ham bit of the word was abandoned because the thing doesn't actually contain ham I don't know. But I doubt it.