House of the Week – 4/8/22
MUNDANE MYSTERIES: Why Are There Eight Buns For Ten Hot Dogs?
Shopping for hot dogs can be frustrating, because the dogs, themselves, are usually sold in packs of 10…but the buns are sold in packs of 8! Why in the world do we have to endure this unequal dog-to-bun ratio?
The National Hot Dog & Sausage Council (which is a real thing) asserts that the disparity exists because of…reasons. To begin with, pretty much no hot dog distributor makes buns & virtually no hot dog bun manufacturer makes hot dogs.
So, let’s look at the industries individually. Why are hot dogs sold in packs of 10? Because that’s the amount that meat producers chose back in the 1940s, around the time hot dogs became available for purchase at retail grocery stores. Because of how meat was usually priced then, the longtime leader of direct-to-consumer hot dogs, Oscar Mayer, would sell hot dogs by the pound. So, ten dogs, weighing 1.6 ounces each, became the ideal product weight distribution.
Bakeries, on the other hand, have had their own different standards. Why are hot dog buns usually sold 8 to a pack? Because the companies’ baking trays are & have typically been sized for that amount, with 2 sets of 4 buns coming off the tray at a time (which is why, as you’ve probably noticed before when you’ve opened a fresh bag, many buns are still stuck together).
The two groups’ standards were instituted independently of one another. There’s not consortium of bakers & dog makers. Bakeries didn’t care about what the hot dog makers were doing when the bakers settled on their 4-roll tray standards. And hot dog producers didn’t consider the difficulty bakeries might have in disrupting their conveyor systems’ flows to offer ten buns per package.
Yes, I know it can be irritating for the numbers to not match up when you only need to buy one or two packages of each. But for the record, if you buy four packs of hot dogs & five packs of buns, you’ll end up with forty matching pairs. That is, if you’re able to stomach that level of hot dog hell. Paging Joey Chesnut!
Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me a message via Twitter (@AndyWebbRadio), or shoot me an email at [email protected].
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House of the Week – 4/1/22
MUNDANE MYSTERIES: What Does “Spick & Span” Actually Mean?
It’s Springtime again! And that means it’s time for “spring cleaning”, in the hopes of making your home, car, office, etc., look super clean & like new. Your goal should be to make your place look “spick & span”, you might say. But what does that even really mean, “spick & span”?
The full phrase was actually “spick & span new”. Before originally, it started as just “span-new”, first used as far back as the early 14th century. “Span-new” was derived from the Old Norse term “spán-nýr“: spán meant “chip” (as in a wood chip); nýr meant “new”. So basically, “span-new” meant “as new as a freshly cut wood chip”.
Spick, on the other hand, is thought to have come from several old words that all meant “nail” or “related to a spike”. Across the various spellings of “spick” across Middle Swedish, Dutch, and also Old Norse, the word was used pretty much the same way “span-new” was used in English, as a way to describe something so pristine that it had to have been newly created.
Somewhere along the way, our English-speaking forebearers blended the two expressions to create “spick & span new”. Sir Thomas North was the first person that we’re aware of who used the phrase, including it in his 1579 translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians & Romans. As time passed, however, the “new” eventually got cut. The first usage of the phrase “spick & span” as we know it today was a diary entry by writer Samuel Pepys from 1665, where he wrote of his friend, Lady Batten, as she was “walking through the dirty lane with new spick & span white shoes.”
The original intent of the phrase was actually in reference to things that were genuinely new. But over the years, the expression’s meaning has relaxed to mean anything that appears to be in its original condition. So, when you say something is “spick & span” now, it’s understood that you aren’t really implying that it’s brand new, merely that it looks like it’s never been used. So, now that you know why we say it…good luck making it a reality in your spring cleaning projects!
Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send me a message via Twitter (@AndyWebbRadio), or shoot me an email at [email protected].
SPONSORED BY: Berryville Graphics
MUNDANE MYSTERIES: Why Are Softballs Called Softballs?
There’s nothing soft about the 6 or 7 ounce, 11- to 12-inch ball at the center of the sport of softball. But, if it’s not soft (which it isn’t), why is a softball a softball?
It actually all goes back to the “ball” that the game began with. In 1887, a group of Harvard & Yale alumni were socializing inside a club in Chicago, IL, keeping tabs on the football game that was being played between the two schools. After Yale won, one of the Yale’s supporters picked up a boxing glove & playfully threw it at a disappointed Harvard guy, who, in turn, swatted it away with a stick.
At that moment, a light bulb went off in the head of a reporter who also happened to be there watching the horseplay. George Hancock was his name, and he cinched up the boxing glove to make it more aerodynamic & then encouraged other club members to start up a baseball game there inside the club.
That softer version of baseball actually caught on & eventually made its way from the inside of a club to the great outdoors, while other versions of the game developed with people using a small medicine ball. The game, itself, had various different names along the way, including “indoor ball”, “diamond ball”, “playground ball”, and even “kitten ball” (because the ball was sometimes made of leather-wrapped yarn). In 1926, at a meeting of the National Recreation Congress, an official of the YMCA officially recognize the game. And it was at that time that the game received its now official name…“softball”. And by the 1930s, there were hundreds of softball leagues enjoying the new sport across the country.
Earlier versions of the game may have featured softer & more cushioned balls, almost all softballs today are usually made with polyurethane or kapok fiber or some other similar firm material (or cork for youth league balls) and covered with either a synthetic or natural leather skin. So, from those soft yarn-stuffed balls, improvised by some guys in a club, to our hardened modern softball, the centerpiece of the sport simply adopted the name of the game itself.
Got a Mundane Mystery you’d like solved? Send a message via Twitter (@AndyWebbRadio), or email [email protected].