My former Cincinnati Enquirer colleague John Byczkowski alerted me on Facebook to a beer column that praised a Cincinnati beer under the headline "Can Cincinnati's Beer Redeem Its Crimes Against Chili?"
If you proceed through Will Gordon's self-indulgent six-graph introduction, he gets around to the beer in the seventh, and in the eighth links to an article slurring Cincinnati chili, the perfect fast food, about which I have apprised you previously.
Chili fanatics have extremely fixed views on the subject. They are essentialists. If it has beans, it is not really chili. If it doesn't have beans, it isn't really chili. If such persons ecountered Cincinnati chili under some other name, they would be able to appreciate its piquant qualities. But they cannot bring themselves to enjoy it because it is not really chili.
Me, I am a happy nominalist. I have eaten meat chili, chili with beans, even vegetarian chili, and countless servings of Cincinnati chili during my years in the Queen City of the West. I was able to enjoy all of them because chili does not indicate to me that the word represents a universal entity with unvarying attributes.
It occurs to me that the people who have the most difficulty with change in the language are also essentialists. For them, they can only ever be a plural because plurality is an essential attribute. Is comprised of is unacceptable, because comprise cannot be possesed to two contrary attributes of meaning. If etymology is an essential attribute of words, then decimate can only mean eliminating one in ten.
Life would be simpler for them, and happier, if they could manage to cross over to nominalism and accept that words mean what we collectively use them to mean over time and syntax goes where we collectively shape it.
Come on over; the chili's fine.