Hot dogs...get your hot dogs here!
UMR's resident hot dog expert, Gerald Cohen, was quoted in this Sunday's Kansas City Star. The Star's J. Brady McCollough spent an afternoon with Cohen in March to get the scoop on the humble sausage's moniker for a feature in the sports section to kick off baseball season.
UMR has a hot dog expert? Actually, Cohen, a professor of foreign languages at UMR, is an etymologist who studies the origins of lots of words. In fact, what began as a search for the origin of the term -- "jazz" wound up as a three-volume dictionary of baseball terms.
In the Star piece, cleverly titled "Frankfurter, she wrote: Hot dog shrouded in mystery," Cohen called writing a book "the closest a man can get to giving birth." He studied the term "hot dog" for 26 years before the book was completed. As McCollough points out, that's a long pregnancy. Oy!
Cohen is also quoted in an accompanying piece in the Star focusing on mustard. Cohen's book, Origin of the Term 'Hot Dog,' was published in 2004.