Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Thoughts of Randomness on Thursday

Well today is the first day of my daily-weekly posts. I am going to start my themed blogs for the next few weeks and see how they go. So be sure to check my blog daily for the new update.

Thursdays I will focus on: Thoughts of Randomness.


Why do we call hot dogs, hot dogs? It seems to me we could have selected a different animal to fulfill the role/roll (he he he—punny) of the hot tube-shaped processed meat. So I did a little research to find out why we call it a hot dog.


In fact, when we eat a hot dog we are actually eating a sausage. The hot dog was initially called a frankfurter after the German city where it was created. The story goes that the frankfurter was compared to a dachshund hound (wiener dog). No doubt some bumbling English teacher first made the analogy and included it in some ridiculous metaphor or simile during a lesson. Well, from that point on (though the English Teacher part was made up) people started calling it the dachshund sausage.


Moving across the pond, rumor has it a vendor who sold ice cream and soda found out about these sausages and the owner, “had his vendors hawk the sausage, instructing them to sell it by yelling, ‘They're red hot. Get your dachshund sausages while they're red hot.’”


From this there was an apparent cartoon made where the vendors were selling actual dogs and the caption said ,“Get your hot dogs!” Since then the name stuck, and millions of children since then have wondered, “Am I really eating a dog?”


So there it is. Random? Perhaps. Happy Thursday.

3 comments:

Morgan Jane said...

Totally random, and very informative. Thank you Teacher Shaw for teaching us something we didn't (need to) know. I for one enjoyed it. And the progression from the original name to Hot Dog reminds me of the random progression from Michael to Ig. This post was meant to be.

Mallory said...

Wow, I never knew... definitely a good bit of trivia to digest *ha ha*
(that picture of Martha Stewart scares me for some reason)

Re. Your comment: We couldn't possibly get rid of Eric's poster (it's far too amazing), I do hope I didn't make my blog sound that way =(
As for your theme suggestion, I can see what you mean, the living room has taken on an old Hollywood/50's horror film theme, and it actually looks really cool, so I'm going to consider what to do with the other rooms.

Anonymous said...

I think I'm gonna throw up

Fauf