I was thinking about the debate of whether a hot dog is a sandwich or not, and that reminded me of something I learned years ago.
What we now know as a hot dog was originally called a Dachshund sausage, which basically translates to "little dog". Many people confuse it with the frankfurter, but there are differences, the main one being that frankfurters are stuffed in a pork sausage casing.
I'm sure you can see where this story is going. And there are several versions of how dachshund sausages became known as hot dogs. One story has New York Journal cartoonist Tad Dorgan drawing a quick sketch of barking dachshunds on buns. According to that version, Dorgan couldn't spell the word dachshund, so he captioned it, "Hot dog, anyone?" (Sadly, if this is true, all traces of that comic have been lost to time, and we cannot prove or disprove it.)
Whether or not there was a pivotal, iconic moment in which one cartoonist changed the zeitgeist and got everybody calling that little sausage a hot dog, it did seem to be a rather sweeping change that began in the 1890s. The sausages were particularly popular on college campuses, where impoverished students were always looking for cheap sources of nourishment. The name caught on there as a disparaging reference to the source of meat, rather than the resemblance to a cute little canine bred for rat hunting.
Whatever the actual source of the name "hot dog", when you make jokes about wiener dogs or taking adorable picture of your doxy in a hot dog bun, you're actually honoring the literal translation of the original name.
