Bowery Speak; Schmegeggy (1939?, 1954); New York Is Not America (1878)

Wed Mar 2 14:32:45 UTC 2005

My earliest "schmegeggy" - unearthed 35 years ago - is this very one.

Leo Gorcey's "Bowery Boys" used *all* of the words cited by the _Voice_.  What more proof do you need, Barry?

You nitpicker.

JL

Bapopik at AOL.COM wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
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Subject: Bowery Speak; Schmegeggy (1939?, 1954); New York Is Not America
(1878)
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Thanks to Ben Zimmer for that Boston poem research. I wanted to see what we have before the Boston Globe comes out.

O.T.: My web site (www.barrypopik.com) got about 2,500 hits yesterday?

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BOWERY SPEAK

>From today's Village Voice. OED has "kick the bucket" from 1785. OED has "chum" from 1684. No one checks. No one. If you write in to correct the record, it's not published. Even if there's a public editor (and the Village Voice doesn't have one), no one responds.

http://www.villagevoice.com/nyclife/0509,bpress,61613,15.html
The Bowery Boys and Gals introduced plenty of raw-knuckled slang into the American vocabulary (bender, blowout, chum, kick the bucket), and patronized emerging popular-entertainment forms like melodrama, vaudeville, and freak shows.

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SCHMEGEGGY

OED has 1964 for "schmegeggy." I don't know what the HDAS will have.

SIDEWALKS OF AMERICA:
FOLKLORE, LEGENDS, SAGAS, TRADITIONS, CUSTOMS, SONGS, STORIES, AND SAYINGS OF CITY FOLK
edited by B. A. Botkin
Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc.
1954

Pg. ? (copy cut off):
II. Schmegeggies.

[FOOTNOTE: Collected by Marion Charles Hatch, written by Herman Spector and Hyde Partnow. From "Living Lore of New York City," Manuscripts of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration in New York City, 1939.]

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NEW YORK IS NOT AMERICA

I just added this to my web site. It wasn't coined by Ford Madox Ford in 1927. It's especially apt after the election of 2004. New York City is a blue state and getting bluer.

The 1878 citation is on the Cornell Making of America. It's from Emma Lazarus? She of Statue of Liberty "give me your poor..." fame??

New York is not America,
being a mirror to the states
by Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939)
New York: A. & C. Boni
1927
...
...
...
(GOOGLE)
City Journal Spring 1995 | Out-of-Step New York by David Brooks
It's a cliché that New York City is not America, but never before has New York been so out of step with the rest of the country. Urbanities - Spring 1995. ...
www.city-journal.org/html/ 5_2_urbanities-out_of_step.html - 76k - Cached - Similar pages
...
...
...
June 1878, Scribner's Monthly, pg. 256:
In the first place, New York is not America, as Paris is France.
...
...
June 1890, Century Illustrated Magazine, pg. 281:
"But I say, old fellow, New York is not America, and there's a queer thing you have to be behind the curtain to find out."
...
...
September 1899, The Arena (Boston), pg. 378:
Happily, New York is not America as Paris is France.
...
...
6 May 1898, Chicago Daily Tribune, pg. 5:
"You know I can scarcely say much about Chicago now, as I came directly to Evanston without stopping," he (English poet Richard Le Gallienne - ed.) said. "But I am looking forward to seeing it with great interest. They say New York is not America at all, and that one finds it much more here, and I think this must be so in a way."
...
...
22 September 1900, New York TImes, pg. BR14:
John Lane will shortly publish a new volume by Richard Le Gallienne, something after the style of this author's "Prose Fancies." It will be entitled "Sleeping Beauty, and Other Prose Fancies," after the first essay. It is a "fancy," when Mr. Le Gallienne exclaims on landing in New York, "So, this is America!" As he goes on to note New York is not America, but a cosmopolis at the gates of America.
...
...
1 February 1902, New York TImes, pg. BR11:
GILBERT PARKER.
His Home in London and His Visit
to This Country - A Talk
with Him.
(...)
"Well, of course, New York is not America, is it?" I said, thinking of Chinatown and Little Italy and East Houston Street and the other foreign quarters that have so little in common with Fifth Avenue. "You know, nobody was ever born in New York - not even Richard Croker."
...
...
28 March 1906, New York Times, pg. 8:
NEW YORK NOT AMERICA.

Mary Mortimer Maxwell Taken to
Task by a Brooklynite.

To the Editor of The New York Times:

I have read with a good deal of interest the bright articles in the Sunday issues of your paper from the pen of an "English WOman in New York," and have also been interested in the replies from her many critics. I do not doubt but that everything she has written about relative to our homes, our manners, our dress, and our tempers she has actually seen in her peregrinations through New York City. Her description of life in our flats, its conveniences and inconveniences, its trials and its temptations, is no doubt true. But then New York City is not America, (indeed it is more cosmopolitan than American,) and he or she who judges our people by the sample of civilization to be found within its borders will in my opinion go very far astray.
(...)
So, thank God, New York is not the whole of America, and all our families are not reared in narrow apartments where the light trickles in through a hole in an airshaft.
T. G.
Brooklyn, March 26, 1906.
...
...
23 July 1922, New York Times, pg. 92:
WHEN the innocent, guileless, and acquisitive Englishman lands in New York, he is apt to form impressions of America which are fundamentally incorrect and which remain with him during his travels of investigation or on his return. He is not entirely to blame; rather, he is helped to fall into the position by the atmosphere in which he finds himself, even though he is warned again and again that New York is not America, and his candid friends confess in moments of expansion that there is a dim, mysterious country known as the Middle West whose inhabitants refer to the Atlatnic seaboard as the "effete East."

(ADS-L ARCHIVES)

>From "This New York" by Lucius Beebe, NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE, 4 March 1939, pg. 16, col. 2:

Some wag once remarked that good Americans, when they died, went to Paris. Somebody also later discovered that New York was not America, a fortunate exemption, which makes it possible for good New Yorkers, when dead, to go not to Paris but to San Francisco. Only San Francisco rather prefers them alive.

>From the NYHT, 6 February 1948, pg. 22, col. 2:

_Simeon Strunsky Dies at 68;_
_Writer for "The New York Times"_
_His Unsigned Topical Essays_
_on Editorial Page Won_
_Him Wide Recognition_
(...) He was skeptical of any generalization, and the cliche "New York is not America" moved him repeatedly to demonstrate that it was nothing but America.
(...)(Col. 3--ed.)
He was the author of several books...and "No Mean City," 1944. The last, a defense of New York against all criticism, expressed his love for the metropolis to which he had grown up and worked.

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