The video starts at the beginning, tracing the hot dog's roots back to the sausage and the meaning of the word sausage.. According to the guys at Discovery News, the word sausage comes from the Middle English word sausige, which was derived from the Latin root sal, meaning salt. The video exposes other fun facts, like the fact that Americans eat an estimated 20 billion hot dogs a year. That's a lot of hot dogs. It then reveals what's typically used to make a sausage (pronounceable ingredients like meat, meat fat, grain and egg whites) and compares that to what's in the mass-produced hot dogs most Americans are eating on a regular basis.