Laws and Sausage

[Benjamin Barrett]

Laurence Horn wrote:
> At 9:03 PM -0600 1/12/08, Cohen, Gerald Leonard wrote:
>
>> Barry sent the message below to a select group of ads-lers, and I
>> now forward it to the entire list.  Btw (independent of Barry's
>> message), we know that the making of sausages could be unsavory in
>> 19th century USA (dogs, cats, rats), but did these scandals also
>> occur in Germany?  If the making of sausages in Germany was free of
>> the scandals that sometimes plagued the US, Bismarck probably had no
>> reason to make a disparaging remark about sausages. I.e., perhaps he
>> never made it..
>>
>> Gerald Cohen
>>
>
> I always assumed the unsavory part had more to do with which body
> parts of the beasties (pig, cow, sheep, whatever) were used to fill
> up the sausage, and not necessarily with anything as extreme as the
> choice of beasties.  I'm sure the unmentionable body parts would have
> been used in Germany, Scotland, China, or wherever; a sausage skin
> hides a multitude of...whatever.
>

I always associated this with Sinclair's The Jungle. I finally read the
book recently and don't recall any specific mention of hot
dogs/sausages, though there may have been some. The Jungle talked about
unsanitary meat handling practices and how every last bit of meat scrap
was processed into meat products.

Benjamin Barrett
a cyberbreath for language life
livinglanguages.wordpress.com

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org