"Nickel gets you on subway, but garlic gets a seat"

[Jonathan Lighter]

"That and a nickel (dime, quarter, fifty cents, dollar and a quarter, two-fifty, you name it) will get you a cup of coffee."  Apodictic NYC wisdom from before 1950.

JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: "Nickel gets you on subway, but garlic gets a seat"
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At 11:40 PM -0400 8/24/04, Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
>"A NICKEL GETS YOU ON THE SUBWAY, BUT GARLIC GETS YOU A SEAT"
>
>GARLIC + SUBWAY + SEAT--4,130 Google hits, 236 Google Groups hits
>
>This is given as an old New York saying, but I can't find old
>evidence of it. It's sometimes given as "a nickel" and sometimes as
>"three nickels will get you on the subway"--hey, three nickels ain't
>that old!
>
>(GOOGLE)
>Food and Drink - Ezine Articles
>... A Second Language... "Three nickels will get you on the subway, but garlic
>will get you a seat." ~Old New York saying. Low Fat Fallacy ...
>ezinearticles.com/?cat=Food%20and%20Drink - 9k - Cached - Similar pages
>
A related expression is something along the lines of "That and 15
cents will get you (a seat) on the subway", as a disparagement of the
value of whatever "that" was. 15 cents was the oldest subway fare I
personally remember, and hence the form of the expression I recall,
but I'm pretty sure I've come across "that and five cents will get
you on the subway" in novels set in earlier days.

larry


---------------------------------
Do you Yahoo!?
Win 1 of 4,000 free domain names from Yahoo! Enter now.