Hi everyone, and welcome back to the segment called It Means What?

Yay.

Hi, 安澜.

Hi, Lulu, hi, everyone.

欢迎大家回来【词源考古研究所】这个板块, so in this segment, we're going to explore the interesting origin of words and phrases. So 安澜, what is the word for today?

Well, I know how much you like food.

Thank you.

So I've chosen one that's food related.

But hang on, it’s not British food, is it? Yes.

It’s not fish and chips, is it?

How can we explore the etymology of fish and chips? A fish is a fish, chip is a chip.

So what is it?

Sandwich.

Not so much better sandwich, 三明治. I think I've read that somewhere. Isn't that the name of a guy?

It is the Earl of Sandwich.

The Earl of Sandwich. Earl is like an aristocratic title,伯爵, but you have Earl Grey like the tea. So this guy literally is called Sandwich.

But he wasn't named after a sandwich. The sandwich was named after him.

True.

Give us the story.

So it's quite a famous story. Now the Earl of Sandwich in the 18th century loved gambling.

Really really loved gambling. And when he was gambling, he never wanted to leave the gambling table. So one day he asked his servant to put some cold meat in between two slices of bread, cold meat,

Cold meat, it's not meat that has been cooled down. It's like cold cuts, right?

Yes.

冷餐的什么火腿切的那种 a cold meat, 熟食。

So the reason why he did this is that he could eat one handed while the other hand he held his cards.

So get rid of knife and fork.

No knife and fork.

Just use breads as wrapping.

Exactly. So he used to do this when he was gambling. And eventually his friends started to order the same as Sandwich.

I see.

So he got his servants to prepare the bread exactly as he liked it, pieces of meat within two slices of bread. And then his friends looked at it, well, looks yummy just same as Sandwich.

Exactly.

And then it became a sandwich.

I see I would love to have some food named after me. They'd be calling it a Lulu.

I don't think it would be that tasty though.

Really?

No comment.

All right, the same as sandwich I see, but sandwich then got hugely popular because actually what's not to like everything is a lot of... even though in Chinese we don't call it a sandwich but we have a lot of sandwich-like stuff, think about like our 肉夹馍, that's also meat within bread essentially.

Exactly. That's the whole thing I think because it's so brilliantly simple. now it's eaten around the world. And we got so many different names for it as well. Sometimes it's called a ‘butty’ or it's called a ‘sarnie’.

I've never heard of those two, that must be British.

They are very British, they are quite British.

In American English, they also have a lot of I don't think it's a general slang for sandwich, but they have a lot of specific sandwich types and they would call it, for example, a Meatball Sub like a submarine sandwich; or going down south, you have things like Po’Boy, things like that.

The thing is that in America you have things like BLT.

Is BLT American thing?

It's American, but we eat them in the UK.

Guess what BLT stands for in terms of sandwich. BLT, you know the words, 3-2-1, got it. B is... bacon; L, lettuce; and T, tomato. It’s a very simple sandwich就是培根, 生菜和西红柿. Yeah, that does not sound great.

It’s really nice. I have to admit my two most favorite sandwiches are cheese and pickle.

Pickle就是泡菜吗?

It's a type of 泡菜, but it's sweet.

甜的泡菜 with cheese.

With cheese and pickle.

Is it melted cheese or just.

No, solid cheese.

难怪说英国人吃不到什么好东西.

I've got a jar of pickle in my fridge at home in Beijing.

For your cheese and pickle sandwich.

Every so often I do make a cheese and pickle sandwich. But the problem is that living in Beijing, cheese is quite expensive, bread is quite expensive.

So it's actually cheaper just to eat noodles.

But when you say bread, you're not talking about the bread that we see very often in China, the white bread, a lot of the sandwiches are probably made with harder bread?

It depends, it could be made with so many different types of bread and I won't go into all of the different types because there's so many.

You know the chain sandwich place called Subway.

Right.

Subway中文叫赛百味, 在中国不是特别popular for reasons you can imagine. But subway is actually quite popular in the States I think, they offer relatively healthy options of for sandwiches and then they have many different breads you can choose from.

We have Subway in the UK as well.

I see, still I really cannot get into sandwiches.

But when I go back to the UK there's one type of sandwich I really like, it’s fish finger sandwich.

Fish finger is like chicken finger说的鱼柳就是那种炸的是吧? Fried fish finger. Use it as a filling for the sandwich?

It is incredibly tasty.

Then don't trust 安澜.

It is lovely. But I want to finish off today's episode because when I was doing a bit of research on this, I found this story and I thought it was brilliant.

Okay, a sandwich related story.

So 2003, a man in Belgium stole diamonds worth $100 million. Wow. He stole these diamonds from a vault that was protected by all of the latest security. It had a lock with 100 million possible combinations. It had radar, it had infrared, he had a magnetic field.

He was good.

He was caught because he left a half eaten sandwich at the crime scene and they found his DNA.

中文里叫阴沟里翻船. He managed to dodge all of those security measures, but he was caught because he couldn't finish his sandwich and left it all at the crime scene.

Exactly. So he did all of this. He got into the vault and decided I've got the diamonds now, I want to eat my sandwich. He couldn't finish it. He left the sandwich behind.

That is not a very good promo message for the sandwich maker because it would have been a great sandwich. He would have finished it and none of this would have been an issue.

But I just love that after all of that, he was caught.

Because of a half-eating sandwich. So guys, if you decide to go through with a bank heist, don't leave your half eaten sandwich or肉夹馍 at the crime scene.

Yeah, always finish it.

Always finish it or don't even start. All right. That ends today's discussion about the origin of the word sandwich. If you like the segment, let us know.

Also if you have any particular request for a particular word or phrase you want us to talk about, leave us a comment in the comment section. Thank you, 安澜for coming to the show.

Thanks, everyone.

We'll see you next time. Bye bye.