| A cheese pizza is a PLAIN pizza, just the core ingredients with nothing extra. A plain donut or plain bagel are the things without any extras. A plain cake is rare but is a cake without extra flavors or frosting or whatever. When it just has chocolate even, people still call it a "chocolate cake" and maybe "plain chocolate cake" but rarely or never simply "plain cake". And because the default for cake is to be chocolate, nobody would be crazy enough to say "vanilla cake" to refer to unadorned chocolate cake. So the use of vanilla to mean regular/plain isn't a lost cause! It's worth criticizing to not lose its real meaning. The pizza analogy really would work like this: say that pepperoni pizza was so common, everyone had that or more complex things and nobody ever had a simple cheese pizza. Then imagine people start using "pepperoni" to mean plain/regular. Metaphorically, they'd start saying "eh, that one night stand — the sex was just pepperoni". Okay, so, upon reconsideration, it's not "plain" or "regular" or "popular" that vanilla refers to. It's original, as in the first thing that seems default and was around before other stuff. These metaphors are complex. But I happen to think we should notice when we use metaphors and consider their meaning, question them, use them thoughtfully… |