Hatunen wrote:
[...]
> If you had a large family to make lunch sandwiches for before
> packing them off to work and school you might think idfferently.
> When I was a small child un-sliced bread was the norm. We got our
> bread at a bakery in our Finnish neighborhood and when they
> bought a bread slicing machine it was considred a clear boon.
>
> Nevertheless, I believe the phrase was originally intended to be
> ironic.

As I've said, my intuition is that "sliced bread" refers to the
ready-sliced and wrapped stuff, not to classical bread which a baker
has put through his machine. That's bread which has been sliced, rather
than "sliced bread". I'm not at all sure that it even refers primarily
to reasonable-quality bread which comes sliced and packed. In Britain
at any rate, the first branded factory-sliced bread was the horrid kind
("Wonderloaf"? Maybe "Mother's Pride") and that's the image which the
phrase brings to my mind: ICBW, but I don't think you could generally
get it _except_ in the sliced form, so "sliced" was part of its
definition.

--
Mike.