"The German language," began Dr. Lenker, "has no commonly used single word that means literally 'sandwich,' and thus, although the sandwich is a relatively common appearance in the German everyday, speakers will often find themselves either importing the English word 'sandwich,' or they employ a modification of the word 'bread.'"
Here Dr. Lenker cleared his throat, and stared for a moment at the empty seat at the back of the hall, where just a moment ago, his third student had been sipping a bottle of cola.
"It is possible to eat a cheese bread, or a covered bread, and these are the most common designators of what would in English be called a sandwich. It should be noted that the emphasis, in these cases, is on the outermost layer of the food item. We innocently proclaim to be eating bread, and we choose to pass over, more or less in silence, what is actually inside the sandwich."
The two remaining students slowly took notes with their pencils, but Dr. Lenker, frowning, visibly doubted any of his thoughts would make it onto paper.
"It is therefore the case that the sandwich, when spoken of in German, is articulated through a rhetoric of concealment."
One of the students noticed that, on the desk beside Dr. Lenker's lecturn, there laid an irregular stack of papers. The student almost thought she saw, under a heap of creased test sheets, one or two thin slices of bread, with an ugly filling peaking out from between them.
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