[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

There is no monument dedicated to the memory of a committee.

J. Pourciau

 

Home computers are being called upon to perform many new functions,
including the consumption of homework formerly eaten by the dog.

Doug Larson

 

My Grandmother is over eighty and still doesn't need glasses. Drinks right
out of the bottle.

Henny Youngman

 

No-one wants advice only corroboration.

John Steinbeck

 

Even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak
it to?

Clarence Darrow

 

When something that honest is said it usually needs a few minutes of silence
to dissipate.

Pamela Ribon

 

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Blue-plate special

 

A blue plate special is (or was) a set meal served at a reduced price,
usually in the cheaper sort of restaurant. The first example in the big
Oxford English Dictionary is from a book by Sinclair Lewis dated 1945, but
it is also the title of a story by Damon Runyon published in 1934. Further
the digital complete text of the New York Times shows it recorded in that
newspaper as far back as 1926, and is probably older still.

 

A good description of the way the term was used is in an issue of the
periodical The Restaurant Man for January 1929 under the title Quick
Lunchplaces Have Own Vernacular. In an attached glossary, the writer wrote
that: "A 'blue plate' is the label given a special daily combination of meat
or fish, potatoes and vegetables, sold at a special price, and is ordered
with the words, 'blue plate' ". 

 

So far so good, but finding out where the phrase comes from is rather more
difficult. Though blue ribbon or blue riband, as a badge of honour that
implies distinction and excellence, dates from early in the nineteenth
century, it's very doubtful whether it had any link to inexpensive
restaurant meals, however good their value. The idea that it comes from a
real blue plate on which the meal was served seems to be the right one. The
Random House Webster's Dictionary says of blue plate: "a plate, often
decorated with a blue willow pattern, divided by ridges into sections for
holding apart several kinds of food". The Dictionary implies that the
inexpensive meals were served on such plates.

 

Daniel Rogov, in the online Culinary Corner, recently provided an answer
that may clear the whole thing up, though this is not indepently confirmed.
He claims the first use of blue-plate special was on a menu of the Fred
Harvey restaurants on 22 October 1892. These restaurants were built at
stations to serve the travelling public on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa
Fe Railroad and it seems the blue-plate set meal was designed to rapidly
serve passengers whose trains stopped only for a few minutes. He went on to
say, "As to why the term 'blue plate' - no mystery here. Fred Harvey bought
nearly all his serving plates from a company in Illinois. Modelling their
inexpensive but sturdy plates after those made famous by Josiah Wedgwood ...
these were, of course, blue in color. Thus, quite literally, the 'blue
plate' special".

 

------

 

Hot dog

 

The usual story told about this comestible is that it was first sold by a
food concessionaire named Harry Stevens at New York's Polo Grounds, the home
of the New York Giants, in the early 1900s. It is said that the famous
cartoonist T A Dorgan (Tad) recorded these odd new things in a cartoon in
the New York Journal, drawing them as dachshunds in buns, and called them
hot dogs because he couldn't spell frankfurter.

 

This tale is reproduced in almost every book on word histories, and at many
online sites, too. It seems to have come about as the result of the obituary
of Harry Stevens that appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on 4 May 1934,
in which these supposed events were recorded; the writer may have borrowed
the story from an article in Restaurant Man in 1929. There are variations:
the Encyclopaedia Britannica says the first stall selling them was at Coney
Island in 1916; The St Louis World Fair of 1904 has been often cited as the
starting point, which takes us well away from the New York nexus of the
majority view.

 

Hardly any of this is true.

 

Leonard Zwilling, of the Dictionary of American Regional English, has
published a lexicon of Tad's language (he popularised a number of phrases,
such as malarkey, hard-boiled, and kibitzer, so he was worth the effort),
and he did find a 1906 cartoon illustrating Harry Stevens' hot dogs, though
it was at a six-day bicycle race in Madison Square Garden, not at the Polo
Grounds. However, since the first recorded use of the phrase is way back in
1895, neither Tad nor Mr Stevens could claim inventor's rights in the name.

 

All this has been exhaustively researched by Barry Popik of the American
Dialect Society, and a summary appears in America in So Many Words by David
K Barnhart and Allan A Metcalf. The information here comes directly or
indirectly from Mr Popik.

 

It seems that the link of dog with sausage actually goes back to the middle
of the nineteenth century in the US, expressing dark suspicions about their
contents. Mr Popik has even found a popular song of 1860, of which you may
know another version:

 

Oh where oh where has my little dog gone?

Oh where oh where can he be?

Now sausage is good, baloney, of course.

Oh where oh where can he be?

They make them of dog, they make them of horse,

I think they made them of he.

 

What seems to have happened is that near the end of the nineteenth century,
around 1894-95, students at Yale University began to refer to the wagons
selling hot sausages in buns as dog wagons. One at Yale was even given the
nickname of "The Kennel Club". It was only a short step from this campus use
of dog to hot dog, and this fateful move was made in a story in the issue of
the Yale Record for 19 October 1895, which ended, "They contentedly munched
hot dogs during the whole service".

 

By one of those coincidences that one can only suspect was part of some vast
and subtle linguistic conspiracy, the term hot dog had been invented about a
year earlier in another context, as a term for a well-dressed young man
(though it has since evolved, so that these days it suggests showing off,
for example performing showy manoeuvres while surfing). This may have been
borrowed from an older bit of American university slang, to put on (the)
dog, to assume pretentious airs, whose first recorded use is also from Yale.

 

The combination of the existing and new usage seems to have been a potent
one in the air of the 1890s and within a few years hot dog become the most
usual term (though frankfurter and wiener are both recorded from the early
1880s, they lost out somewhat in the popularity stakes to hot dog's native
charm).

 

There is enormous inertia in false but fascinating stories.

 

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The Dodge Charger is the muscle car that featured prominently in the TV show
"The Dukes of Hazzard."

 

The Mercury Cyclone is the name of the muscle car with a 428-cubic inch
Cobra Jet V8 engine and a fastback body shape.

 

The Plymouth Superbird was the NASCAR racer from the '70s that was also
available to purchase as a street legal muscle car.

 

The Rambler Rogue V8, a lesser-known muscle car that came as a two-door
coupe with V8 power, does not do well against Mustangs, Camaros, and GTOs.

 

The Pontiac Firebird, based on the Chevrolet Camaro chassis, sold 87,000
units in 1967, the first year of its production.

 

Although not all versions of the Ford Torino are considered to be muscle
cars, the models with higher performance specs, those with a 7-liter Cobra
Jet engine V8 engine are.

 

The Chevrolet El Camino SS, produced by Chevrolet between 1964 and 1987, is
considered a muscle car despite the fact that it is a coupe/utility vehicle,
as they are powered by various big block V8 motors.