Arnold Zwicky's Blog

It’s been a while since I posted about phallicity — though the recent Zippy-inspired riff on submarine sandwiches and their ilk ventures into this territory. But now it’s state fair time, so there’s a rich source of images of phallic food.

In particular, we’ve had Presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann enjoying a corndog at the Iowa State Fair:

No one looks poised consuming a foot-long corndog. But a politician’s gotta do what a politician’s gotta do.

From the Wikipedia page:

A corn dog is a hot dog sausage coated in a thick layer of cornmeal batter and deep fried in oil, although some are baked. Almost all corn dogs are served on wooden sticks, though some early versions had no stick.

(State fair food is heavy on deep-fried things — often remarkable things — and just about anything on a stick, for easy handling. If possible, the two together.)

Foot-long corndogs, like the one Bachmann is coping with, don’t normally have sticks, of course. Here’s a more-or-less standard corndog-on-a-stick, but amended to allude to the calumny that LSU (Louisiana State University) sports fans smell like corndogs (they are sometimes referred to by outsiders as Corndogs):

Yeah, ride that wiener. Also in the breaded hot dog family are pigs in a blanket. From the Wikipedia page:

In the United States, the term “pigs in a blanket” often refers to hot dogs, Vienna sausages, or breakfast/link sausages wrapped in biscuit dough, pancake, or croissant dough, and baked. The dough is sometimes homemade, but canned dough is most common. They are somewhat similar to a sausage roll or (by extension) a baked corn dog. They are served as an appetizer, a children’s dish, or as a breakfast entree. A common variation is to stuff the hot dog or sausage with cheese before wrapping it in dough.

(The term is used in other places, and in some U.S. communities, to refer to other foods — for instance, hot dogs or sausages wrapped in bacon — and foods of this sort are referred to by other terms in some places.) A family of pigs in blankets:

Yet another variant is the bagel dog. Again, from the Wikipedia page:

A bagel dog is a food item consisting of a full-size or miniature hot dog, wrapped in bagel-style breading before or after cooking. They are similar in concept to a corn dog or pigs in a blanket. Bagel dogs are commonly available for purchase at prepared-food concession stands and frozen in grocery stores in the greater New York City, Chicago, and Cincinnati areas, but are more difficult to find elsewhere.

A particularly suggestive portrait:

A classic bagel dog incorporates a kosher hot dog (though I’ve seen drastically non-kosher variants in which the whole business is wrapped in bacon).

(Excellent bagel dogs used to be available at a place not far from the Linguistics Department offices at Ohio State.)

Some earlier postings on wiener phallicity:

3/27/10: The Saturday cartoon crop (link)

8/22/10: for Mod values of Adj (link)

8/23/10: Failure to fact-check (link)

9/11/10: Pink Freud (link)

9/12/10: Phallicity: Würste (link)

9/21/10: Phallicity: hi-def meets hot dog (link)

10/31/10: Wieners (link)

4/1/11: Rutt’s and Mutt’s (link)

This entry was posted on August 23, 2011 at 7:38 am and is filed under Gender and sexuality, Language and food. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.