Why We Call Them “Hot Dogs”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Jerry Yang calling from Merced, California.

Hey, Jerry, welcome to the show.

Hi, Jerry, what’s up?

What I really want to know is who actually invented the word hot dog?

Because I had a very bad experience about 30 years ago because I didn’t know much English.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I was helping this gentleman at our church stacking some chairs.

And it took us pretty much the whole morning.

And I was about maybe 14 back then.

And then just before we finished stacking those chairs, he said,

Jerry, when we’re done here, would you like to go with me and go get a hot dog?

And at the time, I took it as a literal meaning.

And I thought he was insulting me.

You know, being Asian and from Southeast Asia, I would think to myself,

I went, man, I just helped this guy stacking all these chairs, and now he’s insulting me if I would go and eat dog.

And so I was very puzzled.

I was disappointed, but I just decided to go with him.

And later, we went to this hot dog stand and bought the hot dogs, and it was actually pretty good.

I went home that night and spoke to my cousin who came to America first.

And I realized that the, you know, the Frankfurter was not made from dog meat.

So I was actually very embarrassed.

So my question is how in the world the word hot dog, you know, became a word, an English word.

How did hot dog come into the English language?

Dude, I have to say, you had me on tenterhooks.

I did not know how that story was going to turn out.

I’m so glad that it turned out nice.

And I’m so glad that it wasn’t really an insult.

Well, thank you.

So you guys have any answers at all?

I do.

I have tons of answers.

How long do you have?

No, I’ll give you the short version.

And the short version is that there used to be a kind of sausage known as the Frankfurter.

There still is a Frankfurter.

But when Frankfurters were new in the United States, people who made them were often accused of using animal meat that wasn’t cow or pig.

And they did sometimes actually use animals scavenged off the street, including dogs and cats.

And so for years, this joke, you can find it in tons of newspapers and particularly in college newspapers.

For some reason, you’ll find jokes and riddles and dog roll and insults and things talking about going to have a dog.

And they meant a sausage that was made from dog meat and they meant it as a joke.

But the joke kind of stuck.

So by the early 1880s, that particular kind of sausage started to be served hot, and it became literally a hot dog.

Even though by that time there were more regulations about meat, and there were more regulations about what goes into our food and food prep and so forth,

The name really literally stuck.

And here we are in 20-whatever teen using that word to refer to this mixed meat sausage.

Wow. I just learned something new.

And trust me, I have six kids.

My kids love hot dogs.

They’re not made out of dogs now.

They’re made out of whatever’s on the package.

All right.

Turkey, chicken, pork.

I feel better now.

Yeah.

But no, as early as the 1830s, you’ll find jokes written.

Here’s one.

The 1836 in a Massachusetts newspaper, a guy is arguing with a sausage vendor,

And the guy says, I don’t know nothing special about them sassages.

They may be good sassages.

I don’t say they ain’t good sassages.

All I do say is that wherever some ever you see them kind of sassages, you don’t see no dogs.

That’s 1836.

So he’s insinuating there are no dogs in the area because they’re all in the sassages.

So the reputation kind of stuck with this particular kind of meat for a really long time.

Wow.

Yeah.

Crazy, right?

Yeah.

And as I recall, the Coney Island Chamber of Commerce tried to get people to stop using that term.

Called them Coney dogs.

Yeah.

And still in part of the country that we do have.

Not dogs.

I forget what they wanted to call them.

Conies or something like that.

Some places they call them, they call them Kony Islands or something else.

Okay, they tried to make people change, but you can’t do that.

You can’t put language back into the bottle.

No, that’s like putting toothpaste back into the tube.

Yeah, exactly.

So, Jerry, what a great question.

Well, thank you so much, and thank you for having me on the show.

Jerry, you’re a delight and so happy to have you on the show.

Hey, thank you so much.

God bless.

You too.

Cheers.

Bye, Jerry.

Bye-bye.

There’s two things to add to this.

One, because I want to head off the phone calls and emails about it, Tad Dorgan, the cartoonist, did not coin the word hot dog.

The word was already in use, the phrase, the two-word phrase was already in use decades, decades before he was even a cartoonist.

Right, but he did draw a picture of a dog that looked like a Datsun.

Yeah, but that was for a bicycle race or something in 1906, long after it was already being used.

He was just riding the wave that was already in motion long before he came along.

The other thing is I want to share this tiny bit of dog roll from 1895.

Are you saying dog roll on purpose?

No, I am not.

But you can take it that way.

From the Yale Record, which is a student newspaper at Yale University.

And it is, tis dogs delight to bark and bite, thus does the adage run.

But I delight to bite the dog when placed inside a bun.

So 1895.

But again, people were talking about dog meat in the 1830s.

Nervous laughter.

Yeah, with nervous laughter.

They were eating it anyway.

Yeah.

And then 1880s, we see the term kind of firmly established in English.

We’ve come a long way.

Now we have tofu dogs.

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