(Adj) City

[Jesse Sheidlower]

On Mon, Feb 19, 2007 at 06:03:39AM -0800, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>
> *surely* someone has studied these things.  onomasiologists?
> slangologists?

Well, there are two volumes of a big slang dictionary out
there to check....

HDAS has _fist city_ 'a fistfight' as the earliest example of
these, from 1930; later examples include _weep city_ and _beef
city_ from 1946 (with earlier reference), and others. It also
cites Gold's _Jazz Lexicon_ as saying that jazzmen attribute
it to the late 1930s but its main currency to the late 1940s.
_Fat city_ is first from the early 1960s.

Jesse Sheidlower
OED

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