A colleague at work just brought something interesting to mind:

The hot dog purveyor formerly known as "Der Wienerschnitzel" is now simply "Wienerschnitzel" - they've dumped the "Der".

Anyone know when this happened?

And why?

 

.

 

Just Slang.

 

Intrestingly enough, it turns out americans can only remember a maximum of 15 characters in a restaurant's name, the "Der" had to be removed because it brought the total up to 18, not including the space between the 2 words. This was the product of a 36 month study using 8 dummy restaurant names and over 500,000 survey participants. In the study, the restaurants with shorter names significantly out performed those with longer names due to name recognition. The magic number turns out to be 15. The other option was to change the name to either "Der Wiener" or "Der Schnitzel." Needless to say, these didn't go over very well and the company simply decided to drop the "Der." As a result, last quarter's earnings were up 23%, followed by an overall increase in the price of both pork and turkey futures, as well as growth in the pre-packaged chili sector. Oh yea, I made all this up because I'm bored. Don't listen to me.

 

Should we listen to the part where you say, "Don't listen to me"?

 

Yes. No. Yes.

 

True story:
A friend of mine, Dr. Richard Helt, who is a Professor of German Literature at the University of Northern Arizona got together a group of American Germanophiles and launched an articulate protest, criticizing the offending grammar in the fast food title. After a protracted correspondence the company decided simply to drop the ungrammatical article der instead of replacing it with the grammatical das.

 

I recall a friend of mine in high school in the mid-1970s saying the same thing. Apparently Der Wienerschnitzel means something completely different from a hot dog - something made of cardboard as I recall. (OK, in the mid-1970s that could have described their hot dogs . . . still . . . .)

 

[QUOTE]Originally posted by magician
I recall a friend of mine in high school in the mid-1970s saying the same thing.

 

TH: good point.

Maybe the original DW hot dogs were made of ground veal, flour, eggs, breadcrumbs, lemons, anchovies and capers.