FW: "City of Light"

[Frank Abate]

Re Paris as the City of Light, don't forget the line from Randy Newman:

        "Cleveland, City of Light, City of Magic"

 . . . and in the same song, re the Cuyahoga River (which actually DID catch
on fire in the Dark Days before the Clean Water Act):

        "Burn on, Big River, Burn on"

 . . . and:

        "The Lord can make you tumble, the Lord can make you turn, the Lord can
make you overflow . . . but the Lord can't make you burn."

Frank Abate

>>

On Thu, 9 Jan 2003, Laurence Horn wrote:

> We've been through enough fair-based and city-nickname-relevant
> etymythologies that when I saw this little story I immediately began
> to wonder:  Is "the City of Light" as a sobriquet for Paris really
> traceable back to the Paris Fair of 1900, or should that story be
> consigned to the murky dustbin of urban legend, along with the St.
> Louis World's Fair that didn't really give us hamburgers, not to
> mention the Dana non-source of "the Windy City" and Eve's Apples?  Or
> is this one legit?

If this story is the standard one and if Barry lived in France, we would
get daily bulletins from him about newspapers printing the wrong story.  A
search in New York Times Historical shows references to Paris as the "City
of Light" as far back as 1886.

Fred Shapiro


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