Smart Cookie

Before heading to the grocery store, I asked my son whether he wanted anything.  "Pirouettes", he said.  "You mean those cookies you like?" I asked.  He said they aren't exactly cookies and my husband chimed in that they are.  So I went on a hunt for working definition of "cookie".

Google, my default first step for most hunts, yielded, "A small file used to communicate between a web browser and a web server."  Wrong kind of cookie, obviously.  Further down the list I found, "A small cake, usually round, flat, and crisp."  This didn't seem satisfactory either.  I make cookies shaped like christmas trees with my cookie press, so shape isn't germaine.  Aren't gingerbread men cookies?  Flat doesn't hold true either.  What about those round wedding cookie balls?  And to anyone who loves a chewy chocolate chip cookie, "crisp" is just a diappointment.  I gave up and went to the store.

As I stood in the cookie aisle, I browsed the boxes and bags containing a variety of shapes and textures that we would all agree count as cookies.  I found the Pirouettes, which don't say cookie on the container, by the way.  They say "rolled wafers".  Yet they WERE in the cookie aisle.  I looked at some other Pepperage Farm offerings, thinking maybe they don't describe anything as a cookie, but alas, they do. 

Again, I gave up.  I think maybe it's not possible to define cookie completely and concisely.  I guess cookies, in the end, are simply like pornography: you know them when you see them.