Hot Dog Island

I really should have finished reading the Huya and Tuya section of JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS before I filed my report yesterday. On the next page, Tuya refers to herself as a "she-owl"! She also calls herself "your little mouse... your green frog... your coney." She has more cute nicknames for Huya, too: "my little bat... A crafty corncrake... dearest toad... my penguin... my mole..." I had to look up coney, I'm sorry. I know you think less of me now. In this case, it's a rabbit. The OED tells me it can also refer to a hot dog, a meaning going back at least to 1902. When you think about it, Coney Island is Hot Dog Island! Endearingly, one of the citations in the OED is a newspaper article from 1959: "Jim enjoys eating coneys and fried chicken." I don't know who Jim is, but it was big news in 1959!