Last Friday I journeyed with the kids, my sister’s family, and my parents to the Pittsburgh zoo. We had a great time seeing all the animals, and even the car ride was fun (over two hours away). On the way home, somehow or another we got talking about food, and Xoe asked me, not for the first time, why hot dogs are called hot dogs.

Hmmm… I promised to look it up, and promptly did so. =)

Firstly, a hot dog is defined as a particular type of sausage, usually served on a split bun. Check. And in the 1890s, sausages were sometimes referred to as “dogs.” Why? Well, ahem, there was apparently a suspicion that some sausages contained dog meat. And while I didn’t see any documentation on it, the articles said this suspicion was “occasionally justified.”

Ewww. Awww. =( I didn’t tell Xoe that justified part. Just that some people accused sausage makers of it.

Anyway. So earning the name “dog” was just because it was in the sausage family. The fact that they were served on buns made them a quick and easy meal when on the go, and apparently a little boy in the 1890s rushed up to a vendor and said, “Give me a hot dog! Quick!” and it stuck. (Yeah, sounds like lure, doesn’t it? LOL) It was popularized by a cartoon that really got the name stuck.

What’s even more interesting is that it only took 6 years from “hot dog” to go from the accepted name of that particular sausage to a verb used when someone’s showing off. By 1906, “Hot dog!” as an expression of approval had gained its place too.

So now that we’re moving toward the season of picnics and cookouts, you’ll know why you’re tossing hot dogs on the grill and not frankfurters or weiners or plain ol’ sausages. 😉

When Anglo-Saxon Christians first started celebrating the Mass of Christ’s Resurrection, they gave it the name Easter, after Eastre, the goddess of fertility and spring, whose holiday was likely the vernal equinox. All neighboring languages use a word derived from Latin pasche, or passover. (Which makes a while lot more sense.) 

Easter eggs are attested from 1824, the Easter Bunny from 1909. And as a matter of fact, Easter Island is so named because the discoverer did so on Easter Monday! (Actually, he was the second to discover it, but the first didn’t bother naming it.)

And though Christianity has a long history of “taking over” pagan holidays and traditions and using them to get new converts to observe Christianity instead, I have to say I don’t like the English word. I’d never paused to consider it until my piano teacher back in the day refused to use the word “Easter” and instead called it “Resurrection Day.” (Of which I fully approve!) She would even retitle songs for our recitals when necessary. One year I was playing “Easter Song” on the organ, and it because “Resurrection Song.”

But no matter what we call it, this time of year remains my favorite. I love this week leading up to that most glorious day. This Thursday we’ll be observing Maundy Thursday with a messianic seder feast, which I’m really looking forward to. Our usual church service will be on Saturday, and Sunday morning we’ll have an outdoor sunrise service focusing on the resurrection, followed by a breakfast.

And of course, we’re cramming our school week into 3 days so that we can begin our Spring Break in time for the holiday. I hope everyone has a blessed, blessed Holy Week!

Gotta say, I love the word “balderdash.” (Though I have a hard time ‘hearing’ the word without imagining a top-hatted English gentleman huffing it in an upper-crust accent, LOL.) And it has a long history with the English language. =)

Balderdash came into English round about the 1590s, though its origins are misty. Originally it was the name of a drink–a mixture of liquors like milk and beer or beer and wine (eww). It was in the 1670s that it got applied to a senseless jumble of words.

Looking at its parts, it appears that the “balder” is from the Danish word that means “noise, rumble” and the “dash” is from the Scandinavian word, which originally carried the meaning like in dash to pieces. It gained the “move quickly” meaning in the 1300s. So combined, you can see where “balderdash” would come to mean things combined in a noisy, careless fashion.

And of course, now it’s a very fun word game. 😉

I hope everyone has a great week!

Schedule. It’s something we use every day. A time table we keep. An action we perform daily for things like, oh, blog posts. 😉 As both a verb and a noun, it’s a word in such common use that I was shocked to discover it didn’t take on that oh-so-known meaning until railroading days! That’s right, the verb came into being in 1862, and the noun in 1863, both in conjunction with railroads scheduling their trains.

What was it before then, then? Well, originally it meant “a slip of paper with writing upon it.” In that sense it’s been around since the 14th century, taken from a Greek word. These slips of paper were often attached to a document as an appendix–think of those schedules you have to attach to your tax form (ugh, that time of year again!) and it clicks into place.

It’s a fairly easy jump then to these slips of paper with writing on them that the railroads would use, but I gotta say–I’m still surprised at how long it took and how completely the word has taken on this “new” meaning, and whenever I run into a place in a historical novel where I want to use “schedule,” I’m at a complete loss. One time in particular I remember floundering a good while before I decided the character should just keep a calendar rather than a schedule, LOL, and that she would just have to pencil an event onto it rather than schedule it. 😉

I hope everyone had a lovely, green St. Patrick’s Day and is set for a great week! Here in Maryland we’re really enjoying the early arrival of spring. =)

“Thank” seems like a pretty basic word, right? It’s obviously been around for a while. Say, as long as manners. 😉 Still, there’s been some interesting evolution of the word!

Interestingly, “thank” and “think” share a root–“thought, gratitude” is the meaning of the word from which it’s taken, which in turn is from a word that means “think, feel.” Apparently this variation came about from “thoughts” moving into “good thoughts,” which leads to gratitude.

Isn’t that just awesome?

Of course, it had developed an ironic sense–“You can thank her for that catastrophe”–by the 1550s, and by 1703 we were thanking people for nothing.

The phrase “thank you” (short for “I thank you”) is from the 1400s, and had turned into a noun (send him a thank you) by 1792.

I hope everyone has a great week!

What a striking figure. No, not that lady over there, the one I figured out for the math problem. Go figure, right? I know, I know–it’s just a figure of speech. 😉

Figure obviously has a lot of meanings, both as a noun and as a verb. It entered the English language waaaaay back in the 13th century with its two basic meanings: (1) the form of a person or (2) numeral. It adopted rhetorical uses only a century later, yet it took until 1824 for figure of speech to come about. 

As a verb, its primary meaning of “to represent” (Beatrice figures in The Divine Comedy as an inspirational guide through Paradise . . .) is from the 14th century; three hundred years later it evolved into “to picture” or “to make an appearance.” Interestingly, combining it with the “numeral” definition from the noun side of things didn’t happen until the middle of the 19th century–so not until then did you “figure out” a math problem.

Hope everyone has a great Monday!