Barry Popik in WSJ

[Grant Barrett]

Full text, courtesy of Dow Jones News Retrieval. Fair use applies, I believe.

LEISURE & ARTS

Hot Dog! `Big Apple' Explained
By Ed Zotti

01/02/2001
The Wall Street Journal

A20 (Copyright (c) 2001, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

SO, MR. OR MS. Urban Literary Sophisticate, you think you know your word and phrase
origins, do you? Try this pop quiz.

1. New York's nickname, "the Big Apple," originated with (a) 1930s jazz musicians
who said, "There are many apples on the tree, but only one Big Apple," referring to New
York's preeminence as an entertainment center; or (b) 1920s horse-racing insiders,
who considered the city the top racing venue.

2. Chicago is called "the Windy City" because (a) New York Sun editor Charles Dana
urged New Yorkers to ignore the "nonsensical claims of that windy city," referring to
Chicago's noisy efforts to land the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition; or (b) it's
windy.

You said (a) for both, didn't you? Wrong -- although you'd have been accounted right
10 years ago. The correct answer in each case is (b). For this turnabout in the
conventional wisdom you can thank Barry Popik, the restless genius of American etymology.
A part-time New York City parking judge, the 39-year-old Mr. Popik spends his off
hours unearthing the past of American English -- a task he performs with uncommon zeal.


Word detectives tend to be an eccentric breed. The classic case is W. C. Minor, who
dug up more than 10,000 citations for the Oxford English Dictionary, a project he had
a lot of time for since he was a deranged murderer who spent his life in an
institution for the criminally insane. Barry (everyone calls him Barry) isn't round the bend
like Minor, but he brings a similar manic energy to his task. Take his "Big Apple"
research. He started it in 1990 after a chance meeting at the New York Public Library
with Gerald Cohen, a language scholar from the University of Missouri, who was
researching the New York City nickname. Mr. Cohen was certain horse-racing writer John J.
Fitz Gerald was a key figure in popularizing the term, but despite extensive work
hadn't found the "smoking gun" -- a citation establishing that Fitz Gerald was the first
to introduce "Big Apple" to the wider world.

Barry immediately made Mr. Cohen's quest his own. He spent weeks reeling through a
decade's worth of microfilm to find two columns in the New York Morning Telegraph in
which Fitz Gerald explained that he'd first heard the term used by two New Orleans
stable hands in 1920.

Your average etymologist would have been content to publish his findings in a
scholarly journal and leave it at that. Not Barry. He wanted the rest of the world to
accept the truth. Having written the requisite learned articles with Mr. Cohen as
co-author, he began pestering newspaper editors, museum curators and New York city officials
for public acknowledgment of his findings. In 1997, he was able to talk the New York
City Council into declaring the southwest corner of 54th and Broadway in Manhattan,
where Fitz Gerald had lived for many years, Big Apple Corner.

Barry has since devoted countless hours to researching a long list of Americanisms,
among them "hot dog," "Thousand Island dressing," "dude," "jinx," "danish," "chicken
a la king," "Murphy's Law" and many others. Barry now distributes his research over
the Internet, where much of it is available in the ADS-L archive at the American
Dialect Society Web site, www.americandialect.org. Over the past year and a half he has
posted 1,000 messages.

Barry's output continues to be prodigious. On a single recent (and typical) day, his
postings to the ADS mailing list included: a citation for the traders' term "teeny,"
one-sixteenth of a dollar, taken from a recent edition of the Daily News Express;
citations for "Rueben [sic in the original, Barry says] sandwich," "French dip
sandwich," "kaiser roll" and numerous other food terms from a restaurant publication,
1935-37; a discussion of the nonappearance of "chad," the infamous hole-punching detritus,
in a 1950s computer publication and in a review of patents, 1937-60; and citations for
"everything but the kitchen sink," "learn by doing" and other popular expressions
from Popular Mechanics, 1947.

"There's no question that Barry is one of the greatest researchers alive, and the
stuff he manages to find -- about everything, every topic -- is just absolutely
remarkable," says Jesse Sheidlower, principal North American editor for the Oxford English
Dictionary. Allan Metcalf, executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, calls
him "a wonder, a one-man band."

With praise like this, you'd think Barry would be the picture of serenity. Alas, no.
On the evidence of his voluminous correspondence, his life is a roller coaster of
triumph and despair, his discoveries punctuated with exclamation marks, his snubs and
rejections recorded with Dostoyevskian gloom. Much of Barry's pessimism stems from the
difficulty of dislodging entrenched beliefs. Example: "Hot dog." The commonly told
story is that "hot dog" began on a cold day in New York's Polo Grounds in the early
1900s, when food concessionaire Harry Stevens began selling sausages in long buns to
warm up his shivering customers. Supposedly sports cartoonist T. A. Dorgan captured the
event in a drawing, depicting the sausages as dachshunds and calling them "hot dogs"
because he couldn't spell "frankfurter." Nice story, but it's just (sorry) baloney.

Popik established that the term was current at Yale in the fall of 1894, when "dog
wagons" sold hot dogs at the dorms, the name a sarcastic comment on the provenance of
the meat. Did the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council embrace these findings, which
Barry sent to them? No. We might have predicted this. But he took it hard just the
same.

Now Barry has embarked on what arguably is his greatest challenge -- tracking down
the origin of "the whole nine yards," which has eluded researchers for decades.
Numerous possible sources have been advanced, ranging from the length of a shroud to the
capacity of a cement truck, most of which are demonstrably wrong. The most popular
explanation at the moment is that it refers to the length of the .50-caliber ammunition
belt used during World War II. Whether or not this is true, the common sentiment among
etymologists is that it can't be the source of the phrase -- for one thing, the
earliest known citation is from 1966, 21 years after the war's end. "Give me a month,"
says Barry. I'm not holding my breath. But 10 bucks says he gets to the bottom of it
before anybody else.