A Sandwich Short of a Picnic

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Forgive me, please, for putting a rather 'naughty' image at the head of this! Edouard Manet was being a little 'naughty' when he painted it. Perhaps one thing he was trying to say was that men -even the Bohemian ones shown here - are often guilty of being a 'sandwich short of a picnic' when it comes to what they do with women in their minds! That wasn't really what I meant to discuss here (though please feel free to do so ...we could go on for quite a long time on that subject!). I was more interested in the words 'sandwich' and 'picnic', to be honest. Do we all know what a sandwich is? Two pieces of bread enclosing some kind of filling. It's a very old concept and must date from the first time that people ground grain, mixed it with water and baked it on a flat stone. What more natural than to wrap your meat or whatever in it and to eat it from the hand? Today, we'd call that by some fancy name like 'wrap' or 'enchilada' or 'pitta' or 'empanada', to mention just a few. It seems that the idea didn't occur to the English until the 4th Earl of Sandwich reputedly asked his butler to put some meat between two pieces of bread so that he could continue playing cards while he ate - surely one of the first recorded instances of non-stop gaming! Picnics. Something usually reserved for out of doors eating in the summer? Haven't we all had the experience of sand in the sandwich (no, that isn't why they are called that ... see above!) and wasps in the orange juice (or beer, as the case may be)? Again, we have to go back in time - this time to the 17th Century - to find that 'pique-nique' began as a French slang word which originally meant a restaurant meal to which everyone brought their own wine and then became a meal (just as a 'pot-luck supper' is today) where each guest brought a dish to be shared. It was only later that it became applied exclusively to the kind of casual meal eaten out of doors, usually in a scenic spot. MyLot is a picnic! Everyone brings their own ideas and opinions and shares them with everyone else. If you don't like the fish paste sandwiches or the pickled gherkins, nobody's forcing you to eat them but, for heaven's sake, bring your own sandwiches to share ... don't just complain about what other's have brought! That's just a "sandwich short of a picnic" ... in other words, 'a little bit stupid'!