In yesterday's post, I looked at the range of variation in terms that were offered as responses to the prompt: "What do you call a dog of mixed breed?" in the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rockies (LAMR). For today's post, I ran this set of words, which included mongrel, mutt, cur, Heinz 57, and dog, among others, on a collection of lyrics of songs from Billboard's year-end Top Ten charts (1951-2015). Although the set of songs containing these words in the collection is relatively small (9 songs out of 650), they suggest a contrast between the uses of these words in "older" songs and "newer."

First, most of the relatively large set of words found in LAMR and presented in the previous post were not found in this search. Rather, the current search revealed only four variants in the collection: dog, dogs, doggie, and hounds; however, some of these variants appeared in compounds, such as hound dog and junkyard dog.

Second, in terms of a timeline, both the terms that are used and the meaning of the word dog changes after the not-so-famous "chili dog line," which is established by John Cougar's utterance of chili dog in "Jack and Diane" (1982). Thus, doggie and dog are used to refer to an actual dog in Patti Page's "(How Much Is that) Doggie in the Window" (1953); hound dog is used as an insult to a person who constantly cries, has never caught a rabbit, and is no friend of the King's in Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog" (1956); hounds is used to refer to actual hunting dogs in Johnny Horton's "The Battle of New Orleans" (1959); and finally, junkyard dog is used to describe the meanness of one man in Jim Croce's "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" (1973). Then, John Cougar comes along with his tale of "Jack and Diane" (1982), and this happens:

------------------------------"CHILI DOG"------------------------------

After which, only dog or dogs appears in the Top Ten (and never with a preceding adjective), namely in Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's "Tha Crossroads" (1996), Chamillionaire's "Ridin'" (2006), Akon's "I Wanna Love You" (2007), and Silentó's "Watch Me (Whip/Nae Nae)" (2015). More importantly, post chili-dog line, dog takes on a different but singly focused meaning among its users, that of "good friend." (Although its meaning in "Watch Me" is debatable, as are most things about that particular tune.)

As we take into account larger collections of pop music in future posts, we will see how well the chili-dog line holds up. Until then, dogs...

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