T.A. Dorgan "hot dog" story-- discredited but still out there

[Joel S. Berson]

Kogan only says it's the one he likes.

Joel

At 6/21/2010 09:44 AM, Cohen, Gerald Leonard wrote:
>Barry Popik sent me a  cc. of the "hot dog" item below, and I now
>forward it to ads-l.  The T.A. Dorgan/Polo Grounds "hot dog" story
>is charming but, it turns out, fictional.  Dorgan arrived in NYC
>from San Francisco in 1903, and "hot dog" is well attested already
>in the 1890s.
>
>The persistence of an incorrect etymology is remarkable. The Polo
>Grounds/Dorgan story is a hardy perennial, and one of the few
>certainties in life is that at least once every year or two a
>journalist somewhere will print that story as legitimate.
>
>Gerald Cohen
>P.S. If Mr. Kogan (whose name, incidentally, is ultimately the same
>as Cohen) would like any detail about "hot dog," he need only ask.
>
>________________________________
>
>From: Barry Popik [mailto:bapopik at aol.com]
>Sent: Mon 6/21/2010 4:59 AM
>To: rkogan at tribune.com
>Subject: "We" like the Polo Grounds "hot dog" story--proven false
>over 20 years ago?
>
>
>You do know that Gerald Cohen and I wrote a book on the "hot dog"
>(ask Bruce Kraig, of the Chicago Culinary Historians) and disproved
>the Polo Grounds "hot dog" myth many, many years ago?
>...
>Barry Popik
>www.barrypopik.com <http://www.barrypopik.com/>
>...
>...
>http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-06-20/features/ct-sun-0620-sidewalks-hot-dog-20100620_1_hot-dog-red-hot-dachshund-sausages-park-district
>
>Sidewalks: Hot dogs on the run
>
>
>Mobile vendors have enough to worry about - and smile about
>
>June 20, 2010|By Rick Kogan, Tribune newspapers
>
>*
>         Charles Osgood/Chicago Tribune
>
>Recently my colleague Phil Vettel made an impassioned plea for more
>food trucks operating on city streets, writing, "We've already got
>off-site cooking along the Chicago River. If chefs can cook safely
>on Lower Wacker Drive, they certainly can do so in a new mobile kitchen."
>And so, one day, we might be able to gobble, Vettel tells me,
>"meatballs," "filet sandwiches" and perhaps even "cheesecake on a
>stick" from trucks around the city.
>In the meantime we must make do with more prosaic but no less
>satisfying fare, and my favorite among these street foods is the hot dog.
>Though there are a number of stories about the origin of the name
>hot dog, we like the one that starts on an April afternoon in 1900
>outside the old Polo Grounds in New York: Baseball fans were offered
>skinny sausages from vendors shouting, "Get your red hot dachshund
>sausages!" A cartoonist sketched a drawing of barking sausages for
>the next day's paper. Unable to spell "dachshund" and presumably too
>lazy to look it up, he came up with "hot dog."
>
>------------------------------------------------------------
>The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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