So reads a sign — a genuine sign, not an achievement of digital image-making — reproduced widely on Facebook in the past two days:
(#1) The sign at the Wiener Circle / Wieners Circle / Wiener’s Circle, 2622 N. Clark St., Chicago IL 60614; two things about it — its’s a joke, a pun dogs (short for hot dogs ‘frankfurters’) on dogs ‘domestic canines’; and it’s a piece of political mockery
A mockery of Grabpussy, in the US Presidential debates on 9/10, who cited as fact preposterous on-line rumor stories, among them that Haitian immigrants in Springfield OH are preying on people’s pets, eating their dogs and cats — thus painting immigrants as dangerous invaders, monstrous inhuman beasts.
Side note on demonization tales. Grabpussy’s buying into the fantastical stories he picked up on-line — legal murder of unwanted babies after birth, illegal aliens eating pets, and more — of course deserves mockery, but such demonization tales have a long history, and their promulgation has again and again led to murderous attacks on the alien populations (Haitians, Sudanese, blacks, Mexicans, Muslims, of course the famously baby-eating Jews, and on and on) held to be responsible for these outrages. And that is not in any way funny. I say this as a gay man; my people are not a racioethnic minority, but we continue to be targets of fiercely contemptuous rhetoric, demonization tales, and also, every so often, mass murder in our gathering places. The jokes are funny, but the larger picture is dark indeed.
Now to #1, which has, incidentally, made me hungry for a hot dog, Chicago Style or otherwise, and which will ultimately take me to the Philosophy of Science course I took at Princeton roughly 65 years ago; the great linguist Leonard Bloomfield will put in an appearance along the way.
Vienna Beef and Wiener Circle. But let’s start small, back in Chicago. From the Vienna Beef website, two excerpts:
about Vienna Beef:
Making food memories since 1893, Vienna Beef found fame at the World’s Fair / Columbian Exposition, when two brothers debuted their sausages, made according to their Austrian-Hungarian roots. The Chicago Style Hot Dog became an institution during the Great Depression, thanks to its bounty of condiments and five-cents price tag. Today, Vienna Beef products are made right at home in Chicago, in small batches according to our traditional recipes.
about the Wiener Circle:
What can anyone say about the Wiener Circle that hasn’t already been said by the media and countless celebrities? From George Clooney to Barbra Streisand, the Wiener Circle has achieved cult status like no other. From the busy Clark Street location long into the late night after the bars close, their reputation has become a food industry phenom.
Even with all the notoriety, however, it all starts with the food. The quality presentation of Vienna Beef natural casing hot dogs and Polish sausages, either char grilled or steamed, has created the optimum Chicago “feel good” food concept.
And then from Wikipedia:
The Wieners Circle is a hot dog stand on Clark Street in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is known for its Maxwell Street Polish, Char-dogs, hamburgers, cheese fries, and the mutual verbal abuse between the employees and the customers during the late-weekend hours.
The establishment is known for its char-grilled food, especially its hot dogs and hamburgers (commonly called char-dogs and char-burgers). A Wiener Circle char dog with “the works” is a grilled Vienna Beef hot dog on a warm poppy seed bun, topped with mustard, onions, relish, dill pickle spears, tomato slices, sport peppers and a dash of celery salt.
The Wieners Circle opened for business in 1983, replacing a Chicago-style hot dog restaurant in the same location called Harry-O’s. Sometime in the early 1990s (circa 1992) Larry Gold, one of the proprietors, called a drunk and distracted customer an “asshole” in order to get his attention. This set off the late-night abuse culture of the restaurant. The atmosphere can range from playful to hostile. While the atmosphere during business hours in the daytime is normal, the language used by both the staff and customers during the late hours is notoriously foul and aggressive. On the weekends, the establishment stays open as late as 5:00 am, drawing many drunken customers who have arrived from bars and clubs.
… The establishment has a history of political satire in its signage and advertising [AZ: as in #1].
(#2) At night: the Wieners Circle and its sign, here merely touting the food (Wikipedia photo)
The puzzle of the name. As you can see from the signs above, the hot dog stand is officially named The Wieners Circle, with an inflectional suffix on the first noun: either an anomalous plural (so that the name would be parallel to the awkward The Frankfurters Circle; there are occasions that call for a plural, rather than an plain noun stem, as the first element of a N + N compound (we expect The Wiener Circle), but this is not one of them); or a possessive (The Wiener’s Circle) that has been incorrectly spelled, without its apostrophe. Various sources writing about the place either give it its peculiar official name or “fix” the name by using a plain noun stem or an apostrophe’d possessive, and I’ve let these variants stand as they are in the sources.
My own taste would be for The Wiener Circle, but the owners get to choose the name, even if they’d gone for something like Th’ Wiënër’s’ Sïrkül, with its festival of rock dots, apostrophes, and “phonetic” spelling.
The real puzzle about the name, however, is the second, head, element: why is a hot dog stand, or fast-food restaurant, or diner, or whatever it is, called a circle? (Let’s just ignore the fact that the logo has an oval, not a circle, in it.) There’s an obvious reason — well, obvious to people, like me, who’ve had a certain sort of education — why the first element (English) Vienna the placename or (German) Wiener ‘Viennese’ or (English) wiener ‘hot dog’ (from the German) — justified by the Austro-Hungarian origins of the sausages — would trigger the second element Circle. It’s just ordinary word association, for someone who’s reasonably familiar with philosophy in the 20th century. From Wikipedia:
The Vienna Circle (German: [der] Wiener Kreis) of logical empiricism was a group of elite philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna, chaired by Moritz Schlick. The Vienna Circle had a profound influence on 20th-century philosophy, especially philosophy of science and analytic philosophy.
The philosophical position of the Vienna Circle was called logical empiricism (German: logischer Empirismus), logical positivism or neopositivism. It was influenced by Ernst Mach, David Hilbert, French conventionalism (Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem), Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Albert Einstein. The Vienna Circle was pluralistic and committed to the ideals of the Enlightenment. It was unified by the aim of making philosophy scientific with the help of modern logic. Main topics were foundational debates in the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics; the modernization of empiricism by modern logic; the search for an empiricist criterion of meaning; the critique of metaphysics and the unification of the sciences in the unity of science.
Figures from the Vienna Circle itself, and others associated with it more loosely, fled Nazi Germany, establishing themselves throughout western Europe and the United States. These included the philosopher Rudolf Carnap, who ended up at the University of Chicago from 1936-51 and so created a strong bond between the (disbanded) Vienna Circle and the university. Perhaps to the extent that Chicagoans would (like people with some philosophical education) free-associate Vienna and Wiener with Circle.
This is all speculative; I’ve found nothing about why the 1983 founders of the hot dog stand chose the name. And it’s far from an obvious choice; I tried searching for restaurants called “Hot Dog Circle”, but the best Google could do was to offer an approximation: Wieners Circle!
More Vienna Circle influence in the US. Tons. Here I pick out just two cases: the American linguist Leonard Bloomfield (author of the influential textbook Language of 1933; an enormous influence on me, despite his rejection of all forms of psychologism and his embrace of a form of behaviorism); and the German philosopher of science and logician Carl Hempel, who taught at Princeton from 1955 to 1973.
Bloomfield. Deeply influenced by the Vienna Circle. Quite visibly in his 1936 article “Language or Ideas?”, in Language 12.2.89-95. The brisk abstract:
The logicians of the Vienna Circle have independently reached the conclusion of physicalism: any scientifically meaningful statement reports a movement in space and time. This confirms the conclusion of A. P. Weiss and other American workers: the universe of science is a physical universe. This conclusion implies that statements about ‘ideas’ are to be translated into statements about speech-forms.
Hempel. From his Wikipedia entry:
Hempel participated in a congress on scientific philosophy in 1929 where he met Rudolf Carnap and became involved in the Berlin Circle of philosophers associated with the Vienna Circle
After he left Germany, Hempel eventually found a home at Princeton. And taught the philosophy of science to several generations of students, including me.
Where we have been. Off to a rough start with immigrants eating our pets, but eventually redeemed by philosophy. And there were hot dogs along the way. Not a bad trip.