X Rated (Or as close as I’m gonna get)

For the past several days I’ve been racking my brain to come up with a post for the letter X.  Since there are not many words that begin with X, the possibilities are severely limited.  (I know I could have gone with a word like eXhausted, but that would be cheating.)  I coudln’t think of much to say about xylophones or x-rays, and I’ve already written about Xcaret (a Mexican theme park).  That basically left me with X rated. 

So I found myself stuck with the task of figuring out how to write something X rated without it actually being X rated.  X rated just isn’t my style.  Besides, I think double entendre is almost always funnier than coming right out and saying something dirty. 

Well, last night I was standing in the grocery store, picking out wieners when it hit me that I have got to write a post that includes the words, “I was standing in the grocery store picking out wieners”.  So here it is.

I’m sure most of you realize that I’m talking about hot dogs.  I used the word “wiener” because that’s the word that is on the packing for just about every brand of them.  Every once in a while you’ll see them called “franks”, usually when they’re of the Kosher or Ball Park variety, but they’re never labeled as “hot dogs”. 

This doesn’t make sense considering that no one calls them wieners any more.  I mean really, who says, “Hey kids, we’re having wieners for lunch today!”?  Everyone calls them hot dogs, and for good reason.  I’m willing to bet that for most of you, when you hear the word wiener, hot dogs are not the first things that come to mind.  The phrase “I was standing in the grocery store picking out wieners” paints a whole different mental picture when you think about it that way.

Maybe it’s one of those things where they haven’t changed the name for nostalgic reasons.  Because really, it just wouldn’t seem right to sing, “Oh I wish I were an Oscar Meyer hot dog.”  But I have a feeling the company execs just get a kick out of selling a product with a “dirty” name.

I just hope the name doesn’t have anything to do with the content.  I can understand the logic, “We can’t call them hot dogs since they don’t contain actual dogs.”  Does that mean they can call them wieners because they contain you-know-whats?

It also begs the question:  which meaning came first, the edible one or the anatomical one?  I would guess that the food was called “wiener” first and that the other meaning developed as slang from there.  But who really knows (or cares)?  All that matters is that the second meaning has taken over.  It’s kind of like how you can’t call a cat a “pussy” any more, even though that was once a perfectly acceptable word.

OK, so this post isn’t exactly X rated.  I’d say it’s PG-13 at best.  It’s really more like something a fourth grader would write.  I apologize if I’ve disappointed anyone, but sometimes I have to let my inner fourth grader out to play.  Speaking of which, I should finish my sentence by saying, “I was standing in the grocery store picking out wieners when I realized that my life is so boring that getting to use the phrase ‘picking out wieners’ was the highlight of my day.”  Oh well, at least I’ve got a post for X!

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