Hot Dog!

By Allan Metcalf. News flash in the etymological world: Two new antedatings of hot dog! In the etymological world, prospecting for earlier instances of a word is like prospecting for gold in the geological world. You look in the online Oxford English Dictionary for the earliest known date of a word and then go data mining in the archives of old publications for something earlier. One of the leading prospectors is Fred Shapiro of the Yale University Library. He announced his findings in the first instance earlier this year on the American Dialect Society’s discussion list, ADS-L. That got the attention of the assay office, a.k.a. Comments on Etymology, a paper and ink journal I’ve written about before. It’s published by Gerald Cohen at the Missouri University of Science and Technology, and it’s the first draft of etymological history. The news about hot dog came in the recently arrived Vol. 42, Issue 6 for March 2013... But why call it a hot dog in the first place? Simple enough: It’s a joke. It goes back to a 19th-century rumor that the sausages were made of dog meat. Read more...