"hot dog" vs. hot dog

[Joel S. Berson]

At 1/24/2013 09:16 AM, Amy West wrote:
>On 1/24/13 12:00 AM, Automatic digest processor wrote:
>>   Wed, 23 Jan 2013 12:53:31 -0500
>>From:    Laurence Horn<laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
>>Subject: Re: Earliest Known Occurrence of the Term "Hot Dog" Pushed Back to
>>           1886, (Corrected Citation)
>>
>>On Jan 23, 2013, at 9:42 AM, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>>
>>> >Can a food dish using rye bread (and perhaps in preference to rolls)
>>> >and horseradish really originate in Tennessee rather than New York City?
>>> >(Wondered only half seriously.)
>>> >
>>> >Joel
>Actually, and I'm addressing this more to myself, we need to think about
>2 different things: the thing itself and the term applied to it. The
>food item certainly could have originated elsewhere and long before the
>term "hot dog" was applied to it. It's the term "hot dog" that we're
>localizing to TN in 1886
>
>---Amy West

Yes, I had overlooked the distinction between the author and the
narrator.  So we can now search before 1886 both for wiener wurst (or
various other appellations) in NYC and "hot dog" in rural,
unsophisticated (why is there no adjective "hickish"?) Tennessee --
where dogs may be more important to life than in NYC, where eating
out is more important than dogs.

Joel

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