Wordcraft site

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

http://wordcraft.infopop.cc/
  
"Wordcraft" is a site that seems to have started around July 2002. A recent 
post mentions Grant Barrett's "Double Tongued" site. Michael Quinion's new book 
was mentioned, and Quinion responded that he agreed to come up with a better 
photo of himself. Nice stuff.
  
However...the site is miserable.
  
I think I spotted one hit for "Wilton" and one hit for "Historical Dictionary 
of American Slang" and zero hits for "HDAS." "Popik" has zero hits.
  
There is a "Wordcraft Dictionary." Although I've done a good number of these 
terms, you'd never know it. Let's take one that I did ten years ago as an 
example:
  
hot dog – (etymology) By the 1890's this food was popular in New York and 
called "Dachshund sausage".  By the story I favor, a syndicated cartoonist 
sketched a cartoon of a dachshund smeared with mustard, in a bun. But since he could 
not spell dachshund, he captioned the picture "Get your hot dogs!"
    
 
Ah, but there's greater detail on this one:
    
  
Why do we call it a hot dog?
 
The butchers' guild of Frankfurt introduced this form of sausage in 1852. 
Folklore claims that it was made curved at the behest of a butcher who had a pet 
dachshund, and who convinced co-workers that a dachshund-shaped sausage would 
win the locals' hearts and stomachs. In any event, a vendor who hailed from 
that town popularized this food at America's Coney Island, in the 1890's. The 
sausage went under a many names: frankfurter or frank, wienerwurst or wiener 
(after the city of Vienna, spelled "Wien" in the native tongue), and dachshund 
sausage. "Dachshund sausage" was the name used by the vendors who sold it at New 
Your baseball games in 1906.
 
Enter Tad Dorgan, syndicated cartoonist for the Hearst newspapers. He 
sketched a cartoon of a dachshund smeared with mustard, sandwiched in a bun. But 
since he was unable to spell dachshund, he settled on "dog," captioning the 
picture "Get your hot dogs!"

Then name not only stuck, it virtually obsoleted its predecessors, and soon 
spun off terms like the exclamations "hot dog!" and "hot diggity dog".
 
Note: My source for this is Charles Panati's Extraordinary Origins of 
Everyday Thing (including the verb "to obsolete"). Other print sources confirm the 
Dorgan story, though some say the catchphrase "hot dog" was already sweeping the 
nation and helped support the name for the sausage, rather than vice versa. 
In fairness, I'll add that snopes and word-detective stoutly deny the Dorgan 
story – but until otherwise shown, I'm putting my money with the 
published-in-print sources. 
  
  
Yeah, why trust snopes and word-detective? Why even read the HISTORICAL 
DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN SLANG? You've got Charles Panati, and that's all you need. 
Throw in Robert Hendrickson and there you go.
  
This entry was written in 2003. I could go on, but that sums up the site 
right there.
  
WHY IS THE INTERNET/JOURNALISM SO GODDAMN AWFUL?