Today’s Zippy strip displays our Pinhead’s onomatomania, as he chants CAR WASH HOT DOG over and over, to his evident pleasure. I was entertained by the notion of a car wash hot dog, which struck me as ludicrous, conjuring up the image of sodden, sudsy frankfurters in buns:
(#1) But then I remembered that Zippy’s obsessively reiterated chants are never sheer inventions on his part, but are always found mantras, so car wash hot dogs must be a real thing — and so they are, on the understanding ‘hot dogs at a car wash, hot dogs with a car wash, hot dogs and a car wash’, or, as they are sometimes advertised, car wash / hot dog sales
This was all news to me; I didn’t recall ever having heard of selling a car wash along with hot dogs and didn’t think the two things were a natural pairing. But there they were, lots of them, car wash / hot dog sales for very local causes.
Why had I never heard of them? Because they are not just an American thing (unknown in the UK, Australia, and so on, even in Canada), but a very specific regional American thing, apparently confined to a narrow band of the southeastern US, from Florida to West Virginia. (Zippy’s Dingburg is in Maryland, which is, with West Virginia, at the very northern edge of this band). I have lived in the middle Atlantic, New England, mid-America, and California, but not in the southeast, and so I missed out on C. W. H. D. (as Bill Griffith’s title for #1 has it).
