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Ask your typical Brit or Anglophile where the term “bangers” comes from, and you’ll hear a stiff-upper-lipped tale of World War II, meat rationing and high water content in sausages which popped when cooked too long. This 2005 BBC News story on “The politics of sausage” sums up that version of the term’s origin:

“Bangers” dates from WWII - high water content meant they exploded when fried

One problem: Aussies have been calling sausages “bangers” since at least WWI. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first citation comes from 1919, in W.H. Downing’s Digger Dialects, a glossary of phrases and terms used by Australian soldiers during the Great War. The term popped up again in 1928 in the Weekly Dispatch before, ahem, exploding into common usage as a result of watery links during the Second World War.

This is the inaugural entry for Sausage Fest, an Eating…Our Words analysis of all things tubular.

Nothing says “I love you” like sausage.

Written in red block letters on a sign between the two service counters at Southside Market & Barbecue, this dandy of a slogan is slapped atop a black and white image of a smiling old man holding a pan of Elgin Hot Sausage right about waist level. His wife smiles right behind him, helping along the visual pun for the juvenile-minded.

By official state legislative decree, Elgin is the Sausage Capital of Texas, and Southside Market & Barbecue is the town’s original link house. Here you’ll find the original Elgin Hot Sausage, an all beef, peppered tube of legend.

Southside has changed family ownership a few times since 1886, back when a butcher named William J. Moon first set up shop on Central Street in this Hill Country burg, but the hot links reputedly have remained the same. The Bracewell family bought the business in 1968 and moved the operation in 1992 to its current location, a formerly abandoned bank building on HWY 290. The sprawling compound now produces and sells somewhere around two million pounds of sausage a year.