![]() ![]() When inventive cooks started to make the patties from other sorts of meat, or add other ingredients, the linguistic basis was there for -burger to become a semi-detached ending to be stuck on to other words (what grammarians call a combining form) it began life around 1930 and became so popular during that decade that a writer in American Speech in 1939 was able to call it “a favorite broth of the word-brewers”. The idea of putting it in a sandwich followed in the 1880s (it’s often said it was invented at the 1904 World’s Fair in St Louis, but it certainly predates that event) and the classic bun seems to have followed shortly afterwards.ĭespite the fact that it was well known that hamburgers were made from beef, Americans somehow got the idea that the word was made up from ham and burger. The hamburger concept was introduced into North America by immigrants from Germany from the 1870s onwards (the exact sequence of events still being a matter of historical controversy), with the term being recorded in print for the first time in The Caterer and Household Magazine in August 1885. It began in (or became associated with) the north German port of Hamburg in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the ending -er being the standard German way of making adjectives that related to place. It’s well known that the original was Hamburger steak, a thin patty made of ground beef seasoned with onions and fried. ![]() It set me on a trail to discover more about the linguistic legacy of this iconic American food. No one contemplating these developments could call our language dead. There could be fishburgers, jellyburgers, eggburgers and chickenburgers. Now comes a Florida restaurant advertising turtleburgers. Newer, but still familiar, are steakburgers and cheeseburgers. Hunting through an electronic database of ancient US newspapers the other day, I came across this squib by the editor of the Mansfield News Journal of Ohio, dated March 1942:
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