Is a hot dog a sandwich? | The Tylt

It's clear Americans love hot dogs. It's estimated that we eat nearly 20 billion hot dogs per year. But our nation is divided on how to categorize hot dogs. Is a hot dog a sandwich or is a hot dog its own thing? 🌭 

A nation divided is a nation hungry. 🌭

The Atlantic says "the hot dog is, categorically and existentially, simply not a sandwich." The publication says a sandwich must fulfill the following four requirements:

1. To qualify as “a sandwich,” a given food product must, structurally, consist of two (2) exterior pieces that are either separate or mostly separate;
   
2. Those pieces must be primarily carbohydrate-based—so, made of bread or bread-like products;
   
3. The whole assemblage must have a primarily horizontal orientation (so, sitting flush with a plate rather than perpendicular to it); and
   
4. The whole assemblage must be fundamentally portable.
   

But Merriam-Webster—which makes the mother-flippin' dictionary, folks—says the hot dog is a sandwich by the very definition of what a sandwich is:

We know: the idea that a hot dog is a sandwich is heresy to some of you. But given that the definition of sandwich is "two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between," there is no sensible way around it. If you want a meatball sandwich on a split roll to be a kind of sandwich, then you have to accept that a hot dog is also a kind of sandwich.