Big Apple Big Onion; Blimp (1916)

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

BIG APPLE BIG ONION

In a message dated 1/15/2003 10:18:08 AM Eastern Standard Time,
GordonMJ at MISSOURI.EDU writes:


> I hope that someone will respond with info on the more accepted origins of
> the Big Apple instead of just ridiculing this suggestion, imaginative as it
> may be.
>
>

   We've done this a thousand times.  This serves no purpose other than
giving me a heart attack.
   As I wrote in IRISH AMERICA in 1994, "Big Apple" was indeed popularized by
an Irishman named John J. Fitz Gerald, in his horseracing columns in the NEW
YORK MORNING TELEGRAPH in the 1920s.  However, Fitz Gerald admitted that he'd
heard it from an African-American stablehand in New Orleans.  Horses love
apples.  The stablehand almost certainly spoke no Gaelic.
   To rise even to a theory, someone must find a Gaelic "Big Apple" in ONE
SINGLE HISTORICAL CITATION, ANYWHERE.
   The same holds true for "the Big Onion."  I haven't seen "Big Onion" until
the tour group of that name started running NYC tours in the 1990s.  Now, if
someone would kindly show me "the Big Onion," written anywhere, in any
context, we'll be a little further along for its Gaelic origins.
   Or one can simply forget the trouble about finding a single historical
citation and just set up a web site, where it will be quoted as fact by the
New York Public Library, the American Museum of Natural History, and LET'S GO
NEW YORK CITY 2004.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

---------------------------------------------
BLIMP

   The TIMES OF LONDON full text database is still not nearly complete, but
it's no longer 1921-1971.  It now goes back to January 1, 1914.

24 November 1916, pg. 5, col. C, TIMES OF LONDON:
   NEW AEROPLANE FILMS.
     A FLIGHT IN A "BLIMP."
(...)  A flight is made in an airship--a "blimp," as it is called.  The
"blimp" is taken from its huge shed and harnessed up for its trip; bombs are
attached, and the pilot and his observer take their places as the airship
strains at the tethering ropes held by the crew.