For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don’t want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That’s ludicrous!
That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use “less” when they should use “fewer”
I’ve usually heard that framed the other way around, but, yes, that sort of argument is also easily solved by this test.
I’ll recklessly posit that most “is x a y?” arguments can be addressed with this methodology, noting the exception of the fruit and vegetable ones, since the answer is simply a little more complicated, e.g. a tomato is botanically a fruit and culinarily a vegetable. The word fruit and vegetables have similar but functionally different meanings in botany and cuisine terminology, which explains the distinction.
I’d like to argue the fruit/vegetables dilemma is just arbitrary nonsense. All fruits come from vegetation, they’re as much vegetable as the stim, leaves, or flowers. The only reason we separate them is because some idiot got too carried away with taxonamy.
The correct definition of vegetable is “a part of a plant that kids won’t eat”