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Frank ess

wrote:
> 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.

When I was twenty and poor and in a far place (Little Ark Rockinsaw),
my friend and I would wander the streets accumulating impressions and
hunger. On the numerous occasions we managed this at appropriate
hours, we'd find our way to the local bakery of Sliced Bread (Wonder)
at the time the bread was still hot and unsliced. For twenty cents the
friendly baker would sell us an unsliced loaf so hot it melted the wax
on the spotted W'bread wrapper he provided. For a block or two and an
hour or two we were happy and un-hungry.

I remember learning the difference between French bread and anyone
else's was that it contained no milk products.

--
Frank ess