An early "hot dog"/non-college (1896)--(was: ...1897)

[Gerald Cohen]

At 9:11 PM -0400 10/24/03, Fred Shapiro wrote:
>When I search ProQuest I get the following:
>
>1896 _Wash. Post_ 13 Feb. 6  One thousand Sioux warriors met at Pine
>Ridge and over a large number of cold bottles and hot dogs discussed their
>alleged grievances.


Somewhere in my pile of "hot dog" notes is a cartoon which conveys
the idea that Indians eat dogs. The 1896 Washington Post item quoted
just above looks very much like a joke (rather than a bona fide news
item). And "hot dogs" here almost certainly refers to cooked canines
rather than to sausages.

   Feb. 6, 1896 is about 5 months after the first attestations of "hot
dog"appeared (at Yale, Oct. 19, 1895; discovered by Barry Popik), so
there was sufficient time for this new term to spread among humorists
and make its way into the above Washington-Post joke.

     This joke has two important elements:

1) It employs a very new, irreverent, slang item ("hot dog") and is
therefore lexically up-to-date, hip.

2) The presence of Indians notifies the reader that "hot dog" is here
to be understood literally.

   The joke is therefore doubly irreverent: 1) towards the eating
habits of Indians, 2) towards purists in the use of language (the
witty and gross neologism "hot dog" = hot sausage).

    This is all very un-PC. But such was humor in those unenlightened times.

    So, does this 1896 quote provide the first attestation of "hot
dog" outside a college context? That's hard to answer. We deal
primarily with the meaning "cooked canine" and an underlying bit of
college humor ("hot dog" = hot sausage). I prefer to set this example
aside in the search for the earliest non-college attestation of "hot
dog" and instead give the honors to one in which "hot dog"
unambiguously refers to hot sausages. But I understand how others
might decide differently, and I'll include the above attestation in
the upcoming compilation of "hot dog" material.

Gerald Cohen