Barry Popik in my morning paper

[Bapopik at AOL.COM]

Well, it wasn't EXACTLY a correction about the Big Apple whore story of
August 14th:


Popik takes his hobby very seriously, and when somebody messes up on
etymology, he lets them know.

I felt Popik's wrath three weeks ago after writing a piece about Big Apple
Fest, a collection of more than 200 large, painted apples scattered through the
streets of Manhattan. The folks at the fest had told me the city's nickname
stemmed from a 19th-century French prostitute by the name of Evelyn Claudine de
Saint-Evremond (a.k.a. Eve), who sent many a smiling man out the door of her
Lower East Side bordello. I quoted that anecdote, as well as the two other
alleged sources of the phrase from the jazz scene and the horse-racing world.

When my piece appeared, Popik shot through a zinger of an e-mail, utterly
beside himself that I'd repeated an apparent myth.


An APPARENT myth?

Give me a break. It's false. It's quite clear that i"Madam Eve" is a made-up
hoax that its author freely admits to anyone when asked. Simon Houpt didn't
ask.

I asked him to interview the Big Apple Fest people and get the hoax off its
web site. That didn't happen. Instead, the story took the oddball/loser angle
of my life, without mentioning those small 1990s details of losing my home, my
mother, my father, and having an autistic nephew.

It's a big world. Nobody pretty much cares about anything, much less the
origin or words and phrases. Etymology was never a big money-maker for Peter
Tamony, either, although Tamony didn't get the pathetic oddball loser stories, and
David Shulman gets the wonderful old codger stories. Words like "amateur" and
"hobby" are annoying. Nowhere in the story is mention of Gerald Cohen, DARE,
OED, HDAS, the forthcoming Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America.
All that would play against the piece's theme of big world/lone oddball.

The story is better than nothing, I guess.