Antedating of "Windy City"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Mon Nov 6 20:21:30 UTC 2006


"A _tangle-foot_ whisky establishment"? I wonder whether its clientele
consisted of stumble-bums. ("That's a joke, son!" to borrow Senator
Beauregard Claghorn's catchphrase.)

-Wilson

On 11/6/06, Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Fred Shapiro <fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Antedating of "Windy City"
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Windy City (OED 1887, Popik 1876)
>
> 1860 _Milwaukee Daily Sentinel_ 4 July 1 (19th Century U.S. Newspapers)
> We are proud of Milwaukee because she is not overrun with a lazy police
> force as is Chicago -- because her morals are better, he [sic] criminals
> fewer, her credit better; and her taxes lighter in proportion to her
> valuation than Chicago, the windy city of the West.
>
> 1869 _Milwaukee Daily Sentinel_ 28 Apr. (19th Century U.S. Newspapers)
> Chicago is evidently appreciated by the people of Gotham, as witness the
> following from the New York _World_: ... The windy city is to become the
> paradise of parks, and the modern-created Eden is to be the grand watering
> place of the world.
>
> 1870 _Daily Cleveland Herald_ 4 June (19th Century U.S. Newspapers)
> CLEVELAND vs. CHICAGO.  The Great Game Between the Forest City and Chicago
> Clubs -- The Windy City Wins by a Score of 15 to 9 -- A Hotly Contested
> Game.
>
> 1875 _St. Louis Globe-Democrat_ 8 June 2 (19th Century U.S. Newspapers)
> From the Cincinnati Commercial. ... As might be expected, he next visited
> Chicago, and invested his capital in a tangle-foot whisky establishment,
> and some loose matrimonial bonds which he found lying around loose in that
> windy city.
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
>
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
> Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE BOOK OF QUOTATIONS
>    Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press
> Yale Law School                             ISBN 0300107986
> e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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--
Everybody says, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange
complaint to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is knows how deep
a debt of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our
race. He brought death into the world.

--Sam Clemens

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